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What Language Should I use?
What Language Should I use?
Choosing a language suitable for your students can be daunting. Should you go for industry standard languages? Or choose something more dedicated to helping learners learn? Surprisingly, it's a difficult question - you have to balance your student's abilities and interests, the pressures of society and parents, and a wow factor to recruit students to your classroom.
Here are a few suggestions you can consider.
Primary Students or First Time Learners
Primary Students or First Time Learners
A language developed by MIT specifically to help younger students access the essential programming ideas.
Pros:
- many addons available to expand projects
- large collection of community created projects
Cons:
- complex instructions are clunky to program
- uses some non-conventional programming structures (forever loop, clones)
An tool developed by Lego to allow younger students to tangibly see what is happening, instead of just virtually. Can use a tablet to develop and control.
Pros:
- tangible; not virtual
- multiple levels of development for different kids (Ev3, mindstorms)
Cons:
- costly, especially for a class set
- similar with other drag and drop languages, clunky and limited in function
Intermediate/Senior Learners or Experienced Learners
Intermediate/Senior Learners or Experienced Learners
Very popular programming language in the industry because it is simple to read and very flexible.
Pros:
- industry standard - can find other experts to rely on
- large amount of resources and libraries for experimentation
Cons:
- developed for developers, not for learning - many concepts can be skipped over because there is probably already module out there that does it
- daunting - where do you get your students to start?
A language to help visual learners see the programming concepts. Primarily used as a teaching language, although has been known for being used in game development/media development.
Pros:
- great for responding to and visualizing code concepts
- good starting point for computer art design
Cons:
- may be slow due to large processing requirements for creating images
- less popular for most current image processing functions
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