Comparison of English versus Hindi Medium Students for Programming Abilities Acquired through Video-Based Instruction

Acquisition of programming skills is a key aspect of computer science curricula. Students who have studied in their local language have significant difficulty in acquiring programming skills through English medium instruction. Given the known benefits of local language instruction, one approach to tackle this problem is to record the lectures and provide translated videos to such students. As yet, there is no experimental data on the effect of teaching programming using translated videos, on student achievement. In this paper, we report our findings from a study of three groups of students learning programming by watching 3-hours of video lectures on introductory programming. One group of Hindi medium students watched the videos in English while a similar group watched the corresponding Hindi videos. As a baseline, one group of English medium students watched the English videos. We found that the difference between the three groups on post-test achievement was not significant.