A Systematic Literature Review on Teaching Programming to People with Cognitive Disabilities

This Research Full Paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that analyzes scientific studies based on teaching programming to people with cognitive disabilities. Teaching programming is naturally challenging, especially when faced with students with different learning levels, including cognitive impairment. Due to the lack of a panorama that contemplates the association between teaching programming and people with cognitive disabilities, we present this SLR to identify which initiatives are available to teach people with cognitive disabilities to programming. This SLR followed the protocol model of a systematic review adapted to cover specific requirements for planning, executing, and presenting results. There are some initiatives to include students with some cognitive impairment found in the literature. However, there are still gaps to explore. The main question answered by this research is to identify what are the efforts and contributions to teaching people with cognitive disabilities to program, looking for related papers in the Springerlink, ACM, and IEEE databases.