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Microworlds, games, animations, mobile apps, puzzle editors and more: What is important for an introductory programming environment?

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Abstract

Teaching and learning programming constitutes a challenge. Although several teaching approaches and programming tools have been proposed, it seems that they have limited impact on classroom practice. This article investigates students’ perceptions on five educational programming environments that are widely used and the features that any introductory programming environment should have. The environments investigated are: BlueJ; objectKarel; Scratch; Alice; and MIT App inventor. These environments were studied and used by experienced undergraduate students of Informatics in the context of a fourth year course. The main features of the environments and the way of presenting them to students, as well as the assignments in the context of the course are presented, in order to help the reader realize what experience was gained by the students that evaluated the environments. Based on a questionnaire filled in by students interesting conclusions were drawn. Students identified the main features of the environments and evaluated them positively, although problems were identified. An introductory programming environment should engage students through the development of programs connected to their interests, such as games and mobile apps. Moreover, an ideal introductory programming environment should provide a simple and user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) that supports visualization of objects and classes, includes a puzzle-like editor for program development, reports simple and understandable error messages in natural language, and finally the ability to execute the program in a step by step manner. Although no single environment fulfils all these features, it seems that the most successful environment is Scratch.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Informatics, School of Information Sciences, University of Macedonia, 156 Egnatia Street, GR-54636, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Stelios Xinogalos, Maya Satratzemi & Christos Malliarakis

Authors
  1. Stelios Xinogalos
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  2. Maya Satratzemi
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  3. Christos Malliarakis
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Correspondence to Stelios Xinogalos.

Appendix - Questionnaire

Appendix - Questionnaire

Question 1 (Q1): Did any of the environments help you comprehend or deepen on concepts (i.e. object, class, inheritance) that you had been taught in other courses and you had not fully comprehended?

Question 2 (Q2): What is the most effective environment for an introduction to programming independently of the educational level?

For each environment give one answer in the scale of 1 to 5 where 1 = least effective and 5 = most effective.

 

1

2

3

4

5

BlueJ

     

objectKarel

     

Scratch

     

Alice

     

MIT App Inventor

     

Question 3 (Q3): For what aim(s) is each one of the environments appropriate? You can choose one or more from the following or define other aim(s):

  • Introduction to basic algorithmic structures & concepts

  • Introduction to programming

  • Introduction to OOP

  • Introduction to fundamental OO concepts (e.g. object, class, inheritance)

Question 4 (Q4): What are the main advantages and disadvantages of each environment?

Question 5 (Q5): What are the main characteristics that an introductory programming environment should incorporate for each one of the following modules: GUI, Visualization, Editor, Compiler/Error messages, Execution? You can make reference to the environments you used.

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Xinogalos, S., Satratzemi, M. & Malliarakis, C. Microworlds, games, animations, mobile apps, puzzle editors and more: What is important for an introductory programming environment?. Educ Inf Technol 22, 145–176 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-015-9433-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-015-9433-1

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