Third-order interfaces in informatics

The European Strategy “Informatics for All,” formally launched in Brussels in March 2018, distinguishes two tiers of teaching informatics in the system of secondary and higher education. The second tier, focused on the study of informational transformations in artificial, living, and social systems, involves choosing an informatics paradigm for teaching, and then its development. The need for development is due to two reasons: firstly, a significant expansion of the scope of applications of information technologies considered in educational processes, and secondly, the integration of methods and tools of informatics into curricula in other areas of knowledge, which expands the range of information transformations. In the absence of a dominant informatics paradigm and the presence of several of its variants, the question of its choosing as the starting point of development is disputable. The “Informatics education in Europe” review, published in 2017 and preceding the development of the European strategy “Informatics for All,” lists three paradigm variants, including positioning informatics as the fourth great domain of science, proposed by Denning and Rosenbloom in 2009. A detailed description of this variant under the name of polyadic computing was given by Rosenbloom in his book in 2013. The goal of the paper is to define a new concept of “third-order interface” based on the one-natured division of the domain of informatics as polyadic computing. The relevance of the concept is illustrated by the example of robotic arm control using brain–computer interfaces.