ESeeCode: Creating a computer language from teaching experiences

Abstract

It has been almost 50 years since the creation of Logo - one of the first educational programming languages. Although most people agreed that it was important to teach computational thinking to children, only recently have school and district leaders begun to adopt curricula to include it - mainly through Scratch. In many cases this adoption has failed to provide the right methodologies and tools to teachers. In this paper, we analyse some of the different languages used in classrooms today and we propose an improved alternative that we have created - eSeeCode. We also share our experiences using this language in classrooms and how students can learn using this tool.