IT Educator Provides Top Programming Languages for Teachers Students

The push for STEM and coding instruction in classrooms is becoming a lot more common in schools across the nation. For some schools, however, finding the right programming languages to teach their students may be difficult.

Frank Evans, IT expert and educator, shares some of the top 20 programming languages schools should teach their students, including programs for the younger generation of students,

"Nowadays, programming is more widespread and you don’t need a degree to be a programmer; it’s no longer mainly for scientists and engineers: students studying the humanities, English as a foreign language students, people building websites, and a whole host of other folks are learning to program," Evans said. "This non-technical article will give you novices [non-expert instructors] out there some basic guidance in choosing a programming language that is appropriate not only for your students’ needs, but for faculty and staff interested in online basics."

Evans offered teachers 20 programming languages they can use in the classroom, and gathered his information from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, according to the article. Here are just a few he listed:

1. Java
2. C
3. C++
4. Python
5. C# [pronounced C-sharp]

Evans also provided programming for beginners and younger students. He said programming languages "can be taught to beginning students—especially kids." Here are the three programming languages he listed:

• Turtle Art: “Turtle Art is an activity with a Logo-inspired graphical ‘turtle’ that draws colorful art based on Scratch-like snap-together visual programming elements.”
• Scratch: Scratch allows children to program their own interactive stories, games, and animations; these can be shared online with other users.
• Tynker: Beginners can learn the basics of programming or coding games with this programming language.

Evans provided programming languages for students in middle school and beyond including VBScript, Lua, and Papyrus for Skyrim.

"If you, or a student, are interested in building a website, you will need to know the following programming languages:

• HTML [Hypertext Markup Language]. HTML is an example of a Markup language: the programming language that is used to write the code for your website: currently HTML5.
• CSS [Cascading Style Sheets]. This is the programming language used for describing the web pages written in a Markup language. It controls the actual appearance of the web pages that you see when you visit a website.
• JavaScript is a programming language that is used to create an interactive environment within web browsers.
• jQuery is a JavaScript library of codes, which is noted for its speed, compactness, and feature rich content; it has changed the way that people write JavaScript: most web developers prefer to use this than write straight JavaScript because jQuery is easier and can perform all the same tasks with less code."

"Building a website may seem challenging, but it’s not as difficult as it seems," he said. "HTML is, comparatively speaking, an easy language to learn; furthermore, CSS code can be mastered with a little bit of perseverance, and jQuery is well worth learning to use."