Learning programming and using programming languages are the essential aspects of computer science education.Students use programming languages to write their programs.These computer programs(students or practitioners...Learning programming and using programming languages are the essential aspects of computer science education.Students use programming languages to write their programs.These computer programs(students or practitioners written)make computers artificially intelligent and perform the tasks needed by the users.Without these programs,the computer may be visioned as a pointless machine.As the premise of writing programs is situated with specific programming languages,enormous efforts have been made to develop and create programming languages.However,each program-ming language is domain-specific and has its nuances,syntax and seman-tics,with specific pros and cons.These language-specific details,including syntax and semantics,are significant hurdles for novice programmers.Also,the instructors of introductory programming courses find these language specificities as the biggest hurdle in students learning,where more focus is on syntax than logic development and actual implementation of the program.Considering the conceptual difficulty of programming languages and novice students’struggles with the language syntax,this paper describes the design and development of a Context-Free Grammar(CFG)of a programming language for the novice,newcomers and students who do not have computer science as their major.Due to its syntax proximity to daily conversations,this paper hypothesizes that this language will be easy to use and understand by novice programmers.This paper systematically designed the language by identifying themes from various existing programming languages(e.g.,C,Python).Additionally,this paper surveyed computer science experts from industry and academia,where experts self-reported their satisfaction with the newly designed language.The results indicate that 93%of the experts reported satisfaction with the NewBee for novice,newcomer and non-Computer Sci-ence(CS)major students.展开更多
基金supported by the startup fund provided to Dr.Saira Anwar by Texas A&M University,College Station,USA.Any opinions,findings,conclusion,or recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect those of Texas A&M University。
文摘Learning programming and using programming languages are the essential aspects of computer science education.Students use programming languages to write their programs.These computer programs(students or practitioners written)make computers artificially intelligent and perform the tasks needed by the users.Without these programs,the computer may be visioned as a pointless machine.As the premise of writing programs is situated with specific programming languages,enormous efforts have been made to develop and create programming languages.However,each program-ming language is domain-specific and has its nuances,syntax and seman-tics,with specific pros and cons.These language-specific details,including syntax and semantics,are significant hurdles for novice programmers.Also,the instructors of introductory programming courses find these language specificities as the biggest hurdle in students learning,where more focus is on syntax than logic development and actual implementation of the program.Considering the conceptual difficulty of programming languages and novice students’struggles with the language syntax,this paper describes the design and development of a Context-Free Grammar(CFG)of a programming language for the novice,newcomers and students who do not have computer science as their major.Due to its syntax proximity to daily conversations,this paper hypothesizes that this language will be easy to use and understand by novice programmers.This paper systematically designed the language by identifying themes from various existing programming languages(e.g.,C,Python).Additionally,this paper surveyed computer science experts from industry and academia,where experts self-reported their satisfaction with the newly designed language.The results indicate that 93%of the experts reported satisfaction with the NewBee for novice,newcomer and non-Computer Sci-ence(CS)major students.
基金国家教育部博士点基金(the Fund for the Doctoral Program of the Ministry of Education of China under Grant No.20050359004)国家教育部新世纪优秀人才计划项目(the New Century Excellent Talent Foundation from MOE of China under Grant No.NCET-04-050562)安徽省科技公关计划项目(the Key Technologies R&D Program of Anhui Province, China under Grant No.06012069B)
