Adoption of Visual Programming Environments in Programming Learning

Abstract

Programming education is gradually integrated into the school and university curricula. Accordingly, studies in the Computer Science education field have highlighted issues such as high failure rate, memorizing, bugs, the complexity of concepts, motivation, and uconfidence faced by students when learning a programming language, specifically object-oriented programming. These issues require specific learning environments to reach the target audience. Therefore, the objectives of this article are to identify the issues based on previous work and to verify those issues by interview feedback conducted with lecturers in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at the Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Following that, the theoretical principles underpinning environments were studied to explore the suitability of these environments for university education based on the identified issues. The investigated environments included Turtle Graphics, Alice, BlueJ, Greenfoot, Snap!, and NetsBlox, a co-located collaborative block-based programming, and OOPP were studied and used to teach and learn object-oriented programming. Based on the interviews with experts, we found that students still had issues when learning programming, which involved memorizing, bugs, the complexity of concepts, unconfidence, communicating with students during a calamity (distance learning), and a number of students in labs. We conclude that these environments focus on some issues and ignore others, and no single environment satisfies all these issues, which causes students to be demotivated. In a further study, all these issues will be addressed by developing a learning environment, and its effectiveness shall be tested.