Work in Progress: Cultural Borders in CS1.

Teaching introductory programming in a Spanish speaking country means more than teaching the discipline. Tools, compilers, online helps, manuals and related documentation of any language used to teach problem solving and the programming process are in English. Our first year students have a high school English background; we try to use textbooks in English to help them with the terminology and prepare them to use any computer tool. Unfortunately their background in English is not enough to develop a clear correlation between programming languages sentences and the control structures they denote. Examples in textbooks represent traditional games or daily situations not usual in our country. For example, card games are played with a different set of clubs, numbers and faces, dice game like craps are practically unknown for teenagers and our grading system has nothing like a GPA. The average student is too intimidated by the programming task to enjoy these differences, and they see the examples as additional difficulties to surmount