Teaching Visual Programming to High School Students, Experience from Pakistan

Abstract

This paper presents the lessons learnt from a Visual Basic. Net curriculum from Microsoft. The said curriculum by the global name of "Code Rules" was recently localized and called "Coding Mela". A pilot was conducted to evaluate its efficacy towards high school students in a number of cities in Pakistan. The objective of this pilot was to introduce students to basic programming concepts in an easy and interesting manner. Modern programming languages are becoming increasingly complex these days, Visual Basic provides an event based programming model which is more intuitive and interactive for visual programming but a little difficult for the novices to programming. However the language as a whole is easy and simple to learn.