Programming in Arabic

At the Games for Change Europe conference this week here in Paris I learned that there are three things young kids in refugee camps say they are really excited about: (1) Learning English, (2) Making and sending videos on their mobile phones, and (3) Learning to program.

During a workshop at the conference, we talked about ways to make learning to program more accessible to those kids. Practically speaking, we figured it needs to be in on phones (which suggests using some sort of blocks language), and it needs to be in Arabic, since in the camps computers are scarce but SmartPhones are ubiquitous, and a lot more kids speak Arabic than English.

To get the conversation started, I sketched out a simple computer program, just to show the non-programmers in the room how simple programming can be. It’s a program that will be very familiar to some of you reading this blog.

The colleague I wrote about yesterday then translated it into Arabic. Here is what she came up with:

Other than the right-to-left ordering and the change in keywords, it’s very similar to the program I had sketched out. One thing she didn’t need to change was the use of Arabic numerals. 🙂

A good programmer who knows English but not Arabic should be able to figure out what this program computes. Can you?

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