Student agency is the ability to manage and advance one's learning. What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child. Education should foster independent exploration and construction of knowledge, rather than passive acceptance of instruction. Though we agree that a motivated student will always be in pursuit of knowledge, all too often in school we find that knowledge is in fact in heavy pursuit of the student. All students are intrinsically motivated to learn but learn to be unmotivated if they repeatedly fail. Every student has the basic needs to belong, to be competent and to influence what happens to them; motivation to learn only exists when these three conditions are satisfied. This is true at both the elementary level as it is in higher education. We present an operational approach to jumpstarting quantum computing education to learners as early as middle school (or HS). We will present the phase kickback phenomenon and the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm using just the basic rules of arithmetic. Our approach is based on a string-rewriting system invented by Terry Rudolph and introduced in his 2017 book "Q is for Quantum". We will start from classical bits and little by little we will introduce phase, superposition, interference. We will show the simple rules that can help a middle school student trace qubits through a quantum circuit. We will show how to verify what we do using the misty states formalism with circuits implemented in Qiskit. Participants should bring pen and paper. A laptop would come in handy as well.

The modules we have developed and tested in workshops, conference presentations and in the classroom are comprised of (in addition to what was mentioned already, above): Deutsch-Josza, Grover search, superdense coding, teleportation, entanglement swapping and the GHZ game. They can each be used independently in response to student interest, thus solving the problem we mentioned at the beginning. Below we present some materials that can (and some should) be perused by participants in anticipation of the workshop:

• the website for Q is for Quantum (please watch Terry's video, it's only 20 minutes long)
• the Little Qubitzer, a workbook used at SIGCSE 2024 and in C290/A590 at IU Bloomington
• slides documenting the creation of the FLC in QIS in for HS and middle school teachers in IN
• Virtual Lab by Quantum Flytrap allows students to perform/experience quantum experiments

A few other resources:

• a different set of milestones for a related paper (to be submitted soon to ACM Inroads)
• the ultimate target of our approach is John Watrous' playlist and Tommy Wong's textbook
• here's a document written by Martin LaForest, and our book proposal to NoStarch

An updated plan for our workshop will be posted here on May 15, 2025. Here's another update posted on this page early on May 22, 2025 (mostly format but some new content at the end as well).

More exercises: use misty states and/or Qiskit (Python, Google Colab) to prove these identities.