Evolving Technology to Better Support Teaching Introductory Programming Inside Moodle

Abstract

Nowadays, it is increasing the importance of developing skills related to the computational thinking at earlier stages of education, and the adoption of tools that implement the visual programming paradigm has been well succeeded in presenting introductory notions of programming from kindergarten to college. Such tools allows the user to program while manipulating blocks that represent programming languages instructions. iVProg is among this class of tools and was firstly implemented in Java and could be integrated to Moodle using iAssign. Due to technological evolution, iVProg also evolved to iVProgH and its integration to Moodle is still possible by using the new version of iAssign that allow the integration of HTML stack packages to Moodle. In this paper we describe how this evolution takes place and presents iVProgH functionalities as well as iAssign extension to include HTML packages into Moodle. In addition, we give some teaching support whenever integrated using iVProgH with Moodle using iAssign.