Roles of Variables in the Hedy Programming Language

The concept of variables can be hard to grasp for novices. The Roles of Variables framework has been found to enhance learning elementary programming. The 11 roles can describe all variables in novice programs in 99% of the cases. Prior work has shown that the roles give novices better program comprehension capabilities and better programming skills. In this paper we apply the Roles of Variables to Hedy. Hedy is a gradual and multilingual programming language for education. It consists of 18 levels, each supporting new concepts or requiring code that satisfies new syntax rules, to gradually learn programming in Python, and it is available in 50 different (natural) languages. In this paper we explore how to integrate the roles into Hedy. We reflect on the roles by applying them in a new setting and it could later on become useful for the users of Hedy.