Learnable Programming Languages

*This project is on hiatus starting 2022*

Programming can provide motivating applications to engage students with learning in other subjects like pre–calculus and history, but existing programming languages are too hard. We work with teachers to design programming languages specific to tasks in secondary school classrooms, to make them adoptable, usable, and useful for students and teachers.

The long-term goal of this project is to provide access to computing education to all students (the “CS for All” movement, as coined by the Obama administration). The problem is that we have discovered that “access” isn’t the problem. In many states, nearly half of all high schools offer CS classes, but there is no state where more than5% of the students take any classes. If we want students to even see the possibilities of programming and computer science, we have to make it fit into other classes. An example: ANY history class in the United States is more diverse than the average CS class. The ratio of Black students taking AP CS Principles to those in AP US History is 1:5. For Hispanic students, it’s 1:14. AP CS Principles is 24% female. AP US History is 56% female. If we can create programming tools that History teachers find useful and will adopt, we will dramatically increase the number and diversity of US high school students who get the experience of trying programming.

The UARTS Faculty Engineering/Arts Student Team (FEAST) will be tasked with developing and evaluating task-specific programming language prototypes for use in integrating computing into high school and undergraduate classes. We have experience in creating programming languages that are highly usable and learnable, e.g., users are typically working successfully in less than 10 minutes after starting. During the upcoming 18 months, the team will assess several already-developed prototypes. Team members will run participatory design sessions where mathematics and social studies teachers are asked to interact with several prototypes, so that they can give usconcrete feedback on what works, what doesn’t, and what they would really like. Based on this feedback, the team will refine the prototypes to improve usability and performance.