Issues and Challenges for Teaching Successful Programming Courses at National Secondary Schools of Malaysia

Undoubtedly, the initiative of the Malaysia education ministry to introduce coding in school curricula is a very good effort with lots of advantages. Able to code will be an advantage and a necessity when the students join the workforce. After not small amount of budget and time has been spent by the country for this mission, there are several issues that need to be considered and worked on to ensure coding lessons in schools achieves the target. This paper presents six issues and the recommended solutions that do not require a change to the current educations system as frequent changes in national education policy will burden teachers, parents and students. The identified issues are from the perspective of language of communication, implementation and execution, digital divide, quality tools, assessments and teaching and learning time. This works suggests to create a self-learning system built specifically for the national secondary schools’ syllabus, short-term job exemption for teachers and programming skill test to replace project as part of assessments to increase the rate of teaching effectiveness of Computer Science subjects, especially programming. This study will be of great important to educational planners, school authorities, educational researchers and the governments.