Reclaim Open Learning

better online learning for higher ed

Programming in Bengali

September 20, 2013 by Courtney Santos

http://cpbook.subeen.com/p/blog-page.html

Tamim Shahriar

In Bangladesh, every year 9,000 students graduate in computer science. 5,500 more students obtain a CS diploma from different institutes. But most of them don’t possess enough programming skills to work in the industry. One of the main reasons is that grade school education is in Bengali, while in higher education the language is English. Students find it very difficult to learn programming from their first year courses as they are not used to studying English books. To fill this gap, I have written an introductory book on computer programming in Bengali and also published the book in a website under open license. The pages have been viewed 291,000+ times.

Students can read the book from the website and write comments under each chapter. There is a Facebook page with 14,000+ fans and a group with 550+ members. Using these online resources, students can communicate with each other and also with the author.

There are programming examples available in the website whose description is in Bengali and suitable for beginners. Practice problems are scored automatically, and students get instant feedback on whether their solution is correct or not. Some video tutorials are also available to explain general concepts.

The primary audience is college-level students, but the book can be read by anyone with middle-school mathematics knowledge.

I also have started a event titled ‘Programming Adda’ where me and other programmers give talks and students ask questions and share their experiences. So far four such events were arranged in different cities.

From the response of the students, I discovered that they learn programming more easily with this Bengali book. I plan to write more such open books. More programming problems and videos will be added to the website. Using digital resource and open technologies, my book is turning into a social movement to get more people interested to learn programming and give them an opportunity to do so.

The whole book is available online to read for free and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License [URL 1]. The readers can also buy a hard copy from http://rokomari.com/book/10053.

Additional resources:
Programming Problems in Bengali

Facebook Page

Video Tutorials

Facebook Group

Programming Adda

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