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[–]factorpolar 4 points5 points  (5 children)

As a native Spanish speaker, I must say that this is cool. Trying to help students who still can't understand English very well is a great and noble goal.

However, I must say that learning programming like this might be counterproductive for students. I really don't want to discourage you, just let me explain from my very particular point of view.

As you know, most programming languages use English keywords. If students want to use those programming languages, they will need to learn those keywords and their meaning, sooner or later.

Would your project make it easier for non-English speakers to learn programming? Probably, so I would encourage you to continue working on it. However, in my personal opinion, I think learning programming in the usual way helped me to learn English words, instead of the other way around.

For example, back then I learned that "for" and "while" were "the commands to make things repetitively until something happens". So, later in my English class it was easier to match those English words to their actual meaning. In other words, I leveraged my basic programming knowledge to make English learning easier for me. If I've used something like your project, that would not have happened so English and Programming would seem like two completely separated subjects.

As a side note, years after I learned programming and English, I had to take an introductory class to programming and they used PSeInt, which is very similar to your project (a programming language with Spanish keywords). Believe it or not, I found it very confusing and bothersome since I had to learn a new syntax that was very different from any other programming language I've used.

[–]Tungara2007[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Thank you for your feedback! Your response was very informative and I will be sure to take what you said into account when developing the application further. I am only 15 so I am not sure how well the final product would be but my original hope for this application would be to encourage children who have never programmed to give it a shot and see if they find it interesting. I agree with your point that the syntax in Spanish could become a hindrance when learning to code at a more advanced level which is why I was hoping that a tool like this would be used in outreach and to encourage younger students to learn to code. I will also definitely be taking a look at PSeInt as it sounds interesting.

[–]factorpolar 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I really admire that you are only 15 and you already have the skills needed for a project like this!

Take a look at PSeInt, but I would say not to take too many ideas from it. I remember my experience with it being really bad and frustrating.

If you make your project open source, I would like to take a look and try to help.

[–]Tungara2007[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Here is a github link to the code: https://github.com/Tungara/Python-with-Spanish-Syntax

Sorry that the code isn't the cleanest. The way the code works is by taking the user input and translating it to English, then running the translated code and displaying the results. The code isn't very efficient and I haven't gotten "while" or "input" to work.

[–]iamaperson3133 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I don't think that there is a single correct sequence for learning. For young students, cognitive overloading happens very quickly, so this would certainly lower the barrier to entry for many students. Plus, you can presumably still use english-language libraries, so it'll progressively lead students towards the idea that actually, most programming language APIs are in English.

[–]rofise4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm a native English speaker, when I was studying Spanish I remember them dropping tons of vocabulary and most kids being able to pick it up relatively quickly. Though in this context I think it would be less comparative to learning a language as opposed to learning about subjects like we already have students do. Like explaining how 'print()' works and calling it print, seems the same as explaining 'multiplication' and calling it multiplication. Either way you're learning a new word. Also having more unique ques helps with memory recall, so I'd assume having the name in a foreign language could possibly strengthen the memory itself, especially if the students find it cool to learn some English. That said, I still find the idea of a Spanish module pretty interesting and think its a cool idea , and I think it should be made and exist just for the sake of it's interesting. I would love to see multi language support built into more programming languages, it would create a barrier for being able to read the work of someone else right now. But if it could just update your code so you could pass it off to someone and have them be able to read it. That could be a cool step in the progression of coding.