Habits of programming in scratch

Abstract

Visual programming environments are widely used to introduce young people to computer science and programming; in particular, they encourage learning by exploration. During our research on teaching and learning computer science concepts with Scratch, we discovered that Scratch engenders certain habits of programming: (a) a totally bottom-up development process that starts with the individual Scratch blocks, and (b) a tendency to extremely fine-grained programming. Both these behaviors are at odds with accepted practice in computer science that encourages one: (a) to start by designing an algorithm to solve a problem, and (b) to use programming constructs to cleanly structure programs. Our results raise the question of whether exploratory learning with a visual programming environment might actually be detrimental to more advanced study.

Lessons in combining block-based and textual programming

“…Because Tiled Grace enforced scoping of variable-reference tiles (necessary, as the textual language has traditional lexical scoping, and in fact intended to help by offering a list of available names), assembling code in this way was sometimes not possible, to the frustration of the user. One of the trade-offs in integrating the textual and block languages that we had not considered was that this sort of "inside-out" construction, which is very natural and widely-reported [53] in block languages, would be stymied by error prevention in the textual language. Meerbaum-Salant et al have argued that this style is in fact a "bad habit" [53], and that it has a longer-term detrimental effect on learners.…”

“…One of the trade-offs in integrating the textual and block languages that we had not considered was that this sort of "inside-out" construction, which is very natural and widely-reported [53] in block languages, would be stymied by error prevention in the textual language. Meerbaum-Salant et al have argued that this style is in fact a "bad habit" [53], and that it has a longer-term detrimental effect on learners. It is not obvious whether this aspect of Tiled Grace is helping or hindering, and precisely what the long-term goals are may again be important.…”

End-User Experiences of Visual and Textual Programming Environments for Arduino

“…Modkit has been used in workshops teaching children how to program Arduino [17]. Yet while Scratch has been studied to some extent, so far there are no similar studies to investigate the benefits of ModKit or other VPLs for the Arduino. There are also some concerns about the habits Scratch engenders [15]. Following a constructivist philosophy of learning-by-making, Scratch both supports and encourages a bottom-up approach to program construction -programming by bricolage [19], rather than design.…”

Teaching Introductory Programming Concepts: A Comparison of Scratch and Arduino

“…In "Habits of Programming in Scratch," Meerbaum-Salant, et al [46] found that while Scratch encourages self-directed learning, students only really learned programming concepts when explicitly taught them. The habits they found in novice programmers learning with Scratch include bottom-up programming and extremely fine-grained programming.…”

“…Multiple studies have been performed investigating the effectiveness of Scratch in teaching introductory programming concepts [44,46,47,49,53,54]. It works well for some concepts (loops and conditionals) but not for others (variables and functions) [49].…”