Equipping Upper Elementary Students with Web Mobile Skills to Advocate Programming Literacy

The purpose of this study is to measure the ability of fourth, fifth and sixth grade elementary students to learn and apply concepts and skills related to web/mobile programming. A heterogeneous group of students between the ages of nine and eleven was chosen from three different schools in Lebanon. Students were given a crash course over the period of eight weeks where they learned three different programming technologies: HTML, SQL, and JavaScript to produce mobile applications that run on Android devices. Training material was obtained from a newly released book on the market "Mobile Apps Programming Made Easy". The book is written in Arabic and uses simple, clear and user friendly expressions. Training took place in a computer lab at Global University, a private university in Beirut. At the end of the program, all participants were tested to assess their ability to apply the concepts they learned by producing mobile applications that run on Android devices. Results revealed that Sixth graders were very successful in developing web applications using "dynamic" languages such as JavaScript, Fifth graders were partially successful in comprehending and applying languages that are of "dynamic" nature. Fourth graders were able to comprehend and apply any command that represented a "static" language (like HTML) as well as successfully relate the design to its direct output. Recommendations included introducing programming using HTML, SQL, and a combination of HTML, SQL and JavaScript literacy to Fourth, Fifth and Sixth graders respectively.