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The teaching of programming has been acknowledged as a difficult task since its first introduction in schools. The learning results are unsatisfactory, raising questions about the effectiveness of the method used. As it seems, students usually consider programming as a boring and tiring procedure. The problem would be solved if we could make the introductory programming easy and entertaining for the students. This can be achieved by reducing the obstacles for the introduction of programming with the use of special programming environments for the beginners such as Scratch and the App Inventor both of which have been created by MIT. Our research focuses on the similarities and differences between the above mentioned programming environments in our effort to find which of the two is the most appropriate for schools.

Teaching programming is a complex task. The task is even more challenging for introductory modules. There is an ongoing debate in the teaching community over the best approach to teaching introductory programming. Visual block-based programming environments allow school students to create their own programs in ways that are more accessible than in textual programming environments. These environments designed for education allow students to program without the obstacle of syntax errors (errors in typing commands) found in traditional text-based languages. In this paper, the authors focus on the use of App Inventor and Scratch as blocks-based programming environments designed explicitly with novices in mind. In the authors' analysis, both Novice Programming Environments (NPEs) seemed to be attractive platforms for introducing fundamental concepts in computer programming and both look appealing for both majors and non-majors.