Socratic Programming: an innovative programming learning method

Abstract

—In second language acquisition (SLA) environment, learner is a community member and communicates with others, whereas, in a foreign language learning, the practicing dimension is weaker. When it comes to programming, there is no community using a programming language, thus a SLA environment cannot exist. For this reason the most adopted way is teaching programming like a foreign language with all its drawbacks. In this paper we compare between programming language and natural language, knowing that the programming introductory courses have basic concepts without complex algorithms, in other terms more expressive than computational. We propose a new method of teaching programming based upon dialogues between a facilitator and students. The facilitator will be part of a communication between each student and the computer to make an environment suitable for a SLA. A Socratic way of learning is achieved with a teacher having few students and can participate with his students in their dialogue and helps through their guidance to express their ideas. We list 4 common programming problems and we showed that using dialogue and raising questions, students were able to resolve these problems.