Comparing Quantum Software Development Kits for Introductory Level Education

We initiate a study to overview and compare quantum software development kits (QSDKs) in terms of their usability for introductory level quantum education. In this work, we focus on Qiskit, ProjectQ, Cirq, and Forest. For comparison, we define six tasks based on QWorld's introductory tutorial called Bronze. We implement each task on these QSDKs. Besides, we check how easy it is to install them. According to our results, not every QSDK comes as a stand-alone Python package. This may create certain installation and execution problems. Visualization of quantum circuits may be poor or fail in some case. For the rest of tasks, all QSDKs are sufficient to work with.