Improving introductory programming with Scratch?

Programming is known for its complexity and difficulty. It is believed to be hard to teach and to learn and many pupils and students in programming courses have difficulties to master all required competencies and skills. At introductory level of programming that problem is even more notable. There are different approaches to improve the dropout rate at programming courses and to populate programming. Recently, special visual environments for visual programming are being used. Early research results show that visual programming can be more efficient than classical textual programming, students can be more motivated, less bored and not burden with the syntax of programming languages. This paper discusses the visual programming environment Scratch as one of the newer environments for teaching and learning introductory programming. Although it is primarily aimed for school children aged 8 to 16, it can be used also at faculty level. Scratch was experimentally used in primary school for introductory programming, the results of which are presented in the paper. The emphasis of presented results is on retention of opinion and attitude after some time passed from formal using of Scratch. Results are complemented with the results from the same survey on students that also used Scratch.

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