Invitation to Ezhil: A Tamil Programming Language for Early Computer-Science Education

TL;DR

Ezhil is a Tamil programming language designed for K-12 students to introduce computer science concepts in their native language, aiming to improve early access to computing education.

Contribution

The paper presents Ezhil, a Tamil programming language with mixed Tamil-English syntax, tailored for young learners to facilitate early computer science education in Tamil.

Findings

Ezhil supports imperative programming with Tamil-English identifiers.

It aims to ease the transfer of computational skills from Tamil to English programming languages.

Designed specifically for early education in Tamil-speaking regions.

Abstract

Ezhil is a Tamil programming language with support for imperative programming, with mixed use of Tamil and English identifiers and function-names. Ezhil programing system is targeted toward the K-12 (junior high-school) level Tamil speaking students, as an early introduction to thinking like a computer-scientist. We believe this 'numeracy' knowledge is easily transferred over from a native language (Tamil) to the pervasive English language programming systems, in Java, dot-Net, Ruby or Python. Ezhil is an effort to improve access to computing in the 21st Century.