Gradually Learning Programming Supported by a Growable Programming Language

• Published in: IEEE transactions on emerging topics in computing Vol. 4; no. 3; pp. 404 - 415
• Main Authors: Cazzola, Walter, Olivares, Diego Mathias
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-07-2016
• Subjects: Education; gradual learning; Java; modular development of programming languages; modularity; Problem-solving; Programming profession; Syntactics; Teaching of programming
• ISSN: 2168-6750; 2168-6750
• DOI: 10.1109/TETC.2015.2446192

Learning programming is a difficult task. The learning process is particularly disorienting when you are approaching programming for the first time. As a student you are exposed to several new concepts (control flow, variable, etc. but also coding, compiling, etc.) and new ways to think (algorithms). Teachers try to expose the students gradually to the new concepts by presenting them one-by-one but the tools at student's disposal do not help: they provide support, suggestion, and documentation for the full programming language of choice hampering the teacher's efforts. On the other side, students need to learn real languages and not didactic languages. In this paper, we propose an approach to gradually teach programming supported by a programming language that grows-together with its implementation-along with the number of concepts presented to the students. The proposed approach can be applied to the teaching of any programming language, and some experiments with Javascript are reported.