Student Ability for Learning Computer Programming Languages in Primary Schools

Computer Programming Languages (CPL) is known for its complexity and difficulty. It is believed to be hard to teach and to learn also many pupils and students in CPL courses have difficulties to master all required competencies and skills. At the introductory level of CPL, that problem is even more notable. There are different approaches to improve the dropout rate at CPL courses and to populate CPL. Recently, special visual environments for Visual Programming Language (VPL) are being used. Early research results show that VPL can be more efficient than classical textual programming, students can be more motivated, less bored and not burden with the syntax of CPL in hand, also Iraq as a new developing county especially in education and technology not study CPL in primary and high schools. In this study, we use visual basic for learning CPLs at 6th grade to 9th-grade primary schools in Iraq. We teach visual basic in four primary schools in Sulaimani city during a course and we test the students, the result of the test shows that the students have the ability to learn CPL by rating 71%, also the students enjoyed with learning CPL. Finally, the result of this paper helps us to adding CPL curriculum to primary schools as well as to high schools.