Using a Functional Board Game Language to Teach Middle School Programming.

In this work (a full paper on an innovative practice), we report on middle school students’ experiences while learning a new text-based, functional domain-specific teaching language for programming well-known, simple physical games, such as tossing a coin to see who goes first or playing Tic-Tac-Toe. Based on students’ responses after taking an 18-week, 7th grade elective, we find that the majority of the students like learning the new language because it is not block-based, it is not complicated, and it is in the domain of games. However, we also find that there are some students who say programming is what they like the least about the class, and the majority of the students report that they struggle the most with writing the syntax. Overall, the majority of students like the curriculum, language, and using games as a way to explain CS concepts and teach programming. Even though learning a text-based, functional programming language may be difficult for middle-school students, these results show that the domain-specific teaching language is an effective teaching vehicle at the middle school level.