Blog

As with most disciplines, computer science benefits from using different tools and strategies at different points in a student’s development to ensure they get the most out of the teaching. Visual programming languages like Scratch and MIT App Inventor are effective in elementary and middle schools as a good introduction to how programming languages function with a simple and easy to understand block-based programming structure. Once students have gotten a grasp for the very basics of programming through these languages, usually teachers will move on to an easy-to-use text-based programming language, such as Python, where syntax is much simpler compared to more complex languages. Generally, students are taught with languages that are popular among professional businesses and programmers so that they can become familiar with languages actually used in the workforce. Thus, in high school and college, classes tend to focus on more complex uses of Python as well as other languages such as Java, C++, and HTML. Despite this, it isn’t completely necessary to focus on the most popular or used coding languages as much of computer science is built off of learning good coding practices that can be applied to any language in some form.