The understanding of Discipline-Specific Language is an important competency for students of any field to begin mastering early in their studies, since it serves as a prerequisite for both the analysis of expert text and precise communication. Therefore, an introductory curriculum should pay careful attention to how it incorporates, defines, and uses Discipline-Specific Language. While close examination of the language used in instruction has been studied in applied linguistics for more than a decade, this idea has not yet been extensively applied to the language used in Computer Science (CS) instruction. A handful of authors in CS literature have suggested that Discipline-Specific Language be examined in CS education or software engineering education, but little published work has been done to justify the value of further research in this area. In this exploratory research paper, we examine how a well-known Advanced Placement (AP) CS curriculum uses CS-specific language. We posed the following questions to guide our research: 1)Is discipline-specific language identified and defined in the example curricula? 2)Is there temporal contiguity between: a)Occurrences of the same CS-specific word? b)The first occurrence of a CS-specific word and it's definition? We look at what words are used, when they are introduced, how they are defined, and the consistency of their application. To establish an initial set of CS-specific words, we analyzed the free-response questions of past AP CS-A exams and the official AP CS-A course and exam description document. We then recorded every location of each of these words within the curriculum so that we could examine the context around their usage. While we found that technical CS-specific words were regularly defined and applied consistently, common (everyday) words with CS-specific context and connotations were either absent, ill-defined, or not applied consistently. Our results suggest that the example AP CS-A curriculum could improve its introduction of Discipline-Specific Language, and we believe that this preliminary review of a well-known AP CS-A curriculum supports further investigation of other CS curricula and the impacts language has on students' learning and academic success.

We describe a new introductory CS curriculum for middle schools that focuses on teaching CS concepts using the instructions and rules for playing simple, physical games. We deliberately avoid the use of technology and, in particular, programming, and we focus on games, such as tossing a coin to see who goes first and playing Tic-Tac-Toe. We report on middle-school students' understanding of basic CS concepts and their experiences with the curriculum.

In this work (a full paper on an innovative practice), we report on middle school students’ experiences while learning a new text-based, functional domain-specific teaching language for programming well-known, simple physical games, such as tossing a coin to see who goes first or playing Tic-Tac-Toe. Based on students’ responses after taking an 18-week, 7th grade elective, we find that the majority of the students like learning the new language because it is not block-based, it is not complicated, and it is in the domain of games. However, we also find that there are some students who say programming is what they like the least about the class, and the majority of the students report that they struggle the most with writing the syntax. Overall, the majority of students like the curriculum, language, and using games as a way to explain CS concepts and teach programming. Even though learning a text-based, functional programming language may be difficult for middle-school students, these results show that the domain-specific teaching language is an effective teaching vehicle at the middle school level.

From such small beginnings -a mere grain of dust, as it were -do mighty trees take their rise."