PseuToPy: Towards a Non-English Natural Programming Language
Pages 429 - 430
Abstract
Most text-based programming languages found in introductory programming courses use English words. This fact alone can deter non-English speakers who wish to learn to program: how can we expect them to learn a programming language if they do not even understand the meaning of the keywords they are manipulating? In addition, the syntax and semantics of programming languages are also known causes of learners’ mistakes. In this paper, we highlight these difficulties and then present PseuToPy, a programming language which can be localized in several tongues on the one hand and produce instructions close to these natural languages on the other. PseuToPy is still a work in progress: we have developed a version in French and hope to study its use in an educational context to see whether or not programming beginners find it easier to learn programming by implementing algorithms in their native tongues.
Supplementary Material
In this video, we present PseuToPy, a programming language which can be localized in several tongues and which can produce programming instructions that resemble natural language sentences. This video starts with a short demonstration of PseuToPy using Chinese words to declare a list of strings and to print its elements in a for loop. If programming languages were written in Chinese instead of English, would you be able to understand the result of this program without help? Would you be able to recreate this program without making syntax errors? Because PseuToPy is still a work-in-progress, we present the design decisions that we have made when developing this project and the current state of development, which consists of a French working version of PseuToPy. We also have identified research questions that we wish to explore with PseuToPy and presents leads on how to answer these questions in the future.
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References
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Amjad Altadmri and Neil C.C. Brown. 2015. 37 Million Compilations: Investigating Novice Programming Mistakes in Large-Scale Student Data. In Proceedings of the 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education(SIGCSE ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 522–527. https://doi.org/10.1145/2676723.2677258
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Yassine Gader, Charles Lefever, and Patrick Wang. 2021. PseuToPy: Vers Un Langage de Programmation Naturel. In Atelier ”Apprendre La Pensée Informatique de La Maternelle à l’Université”, Dans Le Cadre de La Conférence Environnements Informatiques Pour l’Apprentissage Humain (EIAH), Julien Broisin, Christophe Declercq, Cédric Fluckiger, Yannick Parmentier, Yvan Peter, and Yann Secq (Eds.). Fribourg, Switzerland, 87–95.
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Scott R. Portnoff. 2018. The Introductory Computer Programming Course Is First and Foremost a Language Course. ACM Inroads 9, 2 (April 2018), 34–52. https://doi.org/10.1145/3152433
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Yizhou Qian and James Lehman. 2017. Students’ Misconceptions and Other Difficulties in Introductory Programming: A Literature Review. ACM Transactions on Computing Education 18, 1 (Oct. 2017), 1:1–1:24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3077618
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Yizhou Qian and James D. Lehman. 2016. Correlates of Success in Introductory Programming: A Study with Middle School Students. Journal of Education and Learning 5, 2 (2016), 73–83.
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Published In
August 2021
451 pages
ISBN:9781450383264
DOI:10.1145/3446871
Copyright © 2021 Owner/Author.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
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Association for Computing Machinery
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Published: 17 August 2021
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ICER 2021
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ICER 2021: ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research
August 16 - 19, 2021
Virtual Event, USA
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Overall Acceptance Rate 189 of 803 submissions, 24%
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