Learning Difficulties and Use of Visual Technologies in Learning to Program

Abstract

In recent years, programming has been seen as a promising career with great earning potential. Rapid growth and use of computer technology give further emphasis to programming. Therefore, faculties open programming courses ranging from introductory to advanced levels. Primary and secondary schools also started to include programming courses in their curriculum. However, in the literature, it has been widely accepted that learning to program is a challenging task for students. Studies conducted on programming education show that significant number of students fail the programming course or get low grades. Of the reasons why students have problems in programming, necessity to possess variety of knowledge while dealing with the programming exercises is mentioned most in the research. These are syntactic, conceptual and strategic knowledge. Other reasons involve lack of motivation, lack of skills required for the programming, lack of mathematical knowledge and unfamiliarity with the programming courses. This is a literature review study that discusses learning difficulties of students and visual technologies used in programming courses to overcome problems mentioned above. This study examines technologies such as Scratch, Alice, Blockly, Jeliot and Ville. The properties of these technologies, how they can be used in programming and results of research studying the effectiveness of these technologies are also discussed

Training of highly qualified specialists in the field of software development: problems and solutions in higher educational institutions of Ecuador

“…In fact, there are simpler programming languages created specifically for learning. [17,18] But the question always arises: is learning to program just about learning a language? A writing classification algorithm (any) for all languages will have approximately the same difficulty in understanding the student.…”