An analysis of block-based programming environments for CS1

Abstract

This Research Full Paper presents our experience in analyzing and selecting block-based programming environments to support the teaching of algorithms for the students starting the introductory courses of a Computer Science major. The teaching of algorithms and programming concepts to students of the first years of Computer Science and Engineering courses has been a major challenge because students often have difficulty understanding the logic and abstraction, leading to a high dropout rate. Some strategies have been conducted to further the mission of helping students understand better those basic concepts, but this topic still remains a major problem for students in the initial grades of those courses. In previous projects developed at our university, we have already proposed the use of learning objects and gamification, with very positive results. One of the questions that arise when we adopt new teaching approaches is to know how this new path will contribute to the student’s learning. In this project, we conducted a study on eight block-based programming environments and sought to identify which aspects of those environments comply with the Computer Science reference curriculum. Our work was based on the joint task force on Computing Curricula conducted by the ACM and IEEE Computer Society CS2013 curriculum guidelines for undergraduate programs in Computer Science. We studied the virtual programming environments Alice, MIT App Inventor, Blockly Games, Code.org, Gameblox, Pencil Code, Microsoft MakeCode and Scratch. Then, we crossed the characteristics of each, identified the positive and negative points of each teaching environment in relation to the topics established by the guidelines. We have classified the main characteristics of those programming environments, establishing criteria such as: prior programming knowledge requirements; ease of interaction with users; programming language code; availability of documentation for learning; programming practices addressed by the environment; and ease of learning programming. We believe that this work can contribute to the selection process of a suitable programming environment to be adopted in an introductory course of computer programming.