Multilingual Programming Language Environments for Intercultural Collaboration of Programming Education in K-12

This article is chiefly concerned with multilingual programming language and system for collaboration of programming education in K-12. For a programming language to become a multilingual, it could be programmed in a manner independent on any locale. And this locale independent resource files can be easily translated into a new locale. Therefore when a multilingual programming language for K-12 is designed, it should have no keywords that have a particular meaning to the programming language. In addition, it specifies a set of characters which are based on Unicode character instead of a single character. Dolittle as a both multilingual and educational programming language has all kinds of features described above. Especially, it supports translation server for interculture collaboration between Korea and Japan to teach and learn programming education in K-12. We also conducted experimental lesson to evaluate the effectiveness of Dolittle's inflected dictionary in Korea. It was found from the result of the experimental lesson that using inflected dictionary of identifiers can decrease overall error ratio in comparison with using only one identifier.