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Aim/Purpose This paper presents findings on a curricular intervention aimed at integrating computer programming with reading and writing in early elementary school. The purpose of this research was to explore the relation between students' varying literacy levels and their level of success in mastering an introductory programming language. Methodology This curricular intervention study was implemented in a single school district in southeastern Virginia. Of the district's 33 elementary schools, eight schools received an external grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to introduce computer science in early elementary education. Standardized literacy test scores were correlated with internally developed, and age appropriate programming assessment scores from N = 132 second grade students. Contribution This study is the first of its kind to look at how students at varying literacy levels succeed in mastering an introductory programming language when introduced through a literacy lens. Findings The findings indicated that there was strong evidence for a weak, positive correlation between students' literacy levels, as determined by the PALS assessment, and their programming mastery, as determined by the curricular programming assessments. The positive correlation suggests that there may indeed be underlying constructs that overlap between literacy and programming. Recommendations for Practitioners Consider integrating computer programming as a foundational component of the literacy curriculum, especially in the early grades, where the two skill sets can mutually support one another. Recommendations for Researchers Additional research is necessary, using a variety of literacy and programming measures, to continue to understand the relationship between emerging literacy and emerging computer programming skills. Impact on Society Reimagining computer programming as a language has significant implications for how we teach programming in schools and how students then use programming out in the workforce. Future Research Future work will repeat this curricular intervention with younger students: the district's first grade and kindergarten classrooms. Introducing programming through the Coding as Literacy (CAL) approach even earlier in students' literacy trajectories, we believe, will allow the positive impact of programming knowledge to influence students' literacy development. In this next phase of our research agenda, we will collect pre and post literacy scores, both standardized and internally developed, to see the myriad ways that programming knowledge impacts literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students often find that learning to program is hard. Introductory programming courses have high drop-out rates and students do not learn to program well. This paper presents experiences from three educational institutions where introductory programming courses were improved by adopting Python as the first programming language and roles of variables as an aid in understanding program behavior. As a result of these changes, students were able to write working code from the very beginning, they found programming easy and interesting, they passed exams with good grades, and drop-out rates were low. Students became interested in programming and some of them even changed their personal study plan to include more of programming and computer science. The high abstraction level and complexity of the concepts to be learned in current elementary programming courses is a serious impediment to students. Python is a simple but powerful programming language that supports both procedural and object-oriented programming. It makes short programs straightforward to write while at the same time facilitating rapid development of powerful applications. Python has been found to make programming more fun and thus attract students. Some of the common arguments against Python include concerns about using an interpreted language, the different syntax from C++ and Java, the use of whitespace to represent code blocks, and the lack of static type checking. However, these concerns have not caused any significant problems in practice, though it may take some effort to adapt to the syntax of other languages. Roles of variables are stereotyped patterns of usage of a variable. For example, in the role of a stepper, a variable is assigned a succession of values that is predictable and usually known in advance as soon as the succession starts. Roles provide students with programming knowledge in a compact form, which they can then apply in authoring and understanding programs independently of the programming language used. In a classroom experiment, explicit teaching of roles has been found to result in better programming skills. This paper also discusses the applicability of the roles to Python and notes some changes in the interpretation of individual roles required by some peculiarities of Python. In general, roles apply to Python well. However, the lack of constants in Python calls for a new role, and the use of lists in for-loops suggests a new interpretation for the stepper role. Finally, the difference between the two data structure roles, organizer and container, is smaller in Python than in other languages making their separation needless. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Data Structure is an important and mandatory course in Computer Science and Information Technology curricula. The topics of the course require detailed view of the algorithm behavior with the implementation part by a programming language. This paper introduces a visualized learning environment and assesses the effectiveness of using this system in order to enhance the education in computer science and information technology concerning data structure course. Whether the use of the system will produce remarkable enough affects to encourage the developers to enhance such systems. The system uses embedded visualizer rather than external visualizer to produce the animation. The significant result of the experiment indicates that combining Algorithm and Program Animation is an effective way to enhance students' performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]