Abstract
Scratch and App Inventor are two of the most widely used block-based programming languages for young students. These are educational languages which allow students to program easily by dragging and dropping their code blocks. One question that arises in relation to these educational languages is which of them would be more helpful in fostering computational thinking. It is difficult to answer this question because each language has its own advantages. In this paper, we propose a novel rubric based on Dr. Scratch for assessing both Scratch and App Inventor projects in terms of computational thinking concept learning. We crawled teachers’ and students’ open and popular projects and automatically calculated their effectiveness scores with regard to learning computational thinking concepts based on our rubric. The experimental results show that (1) Scratch projects scored higher on average in Parallelism, Synchronization and Flow Control, while App Inventor projects scored higher on average in User Interactivity and Data Representation. The results also show that (2) in many cases, large programs with numerous lines of code scored high in all areas of computational thinking concepts.
Highlights
Scratch [1,2] and App Inventor [3,4] are two of the most widely used block-based programming languages and environments for colleges, universities and K-12 students
We propose a novel rubric based on Dr Scratch for assessing both Scratch and App
We propose a novel rubric that can be used for assessing both Scratch and App Inventor projects (Section 3)
Summary
Scratch [1,2] and App Inventor [3,4] are two of the most widely used block-based programming languages and environments for colleges, universities and K-12 students. As of August of 2019, there are 44,981,198 registered users on the Scratch website and 8,200,000 registered users on the App. Inventor website. Both Scratch and App Inventor are educational programming languages that allow novice programmers or even young students to program by dragging and dropping their code blocks [5,6]. Scratch was originally developed for teaching young students (ages 8–16) [2], it has been taught at the college level [7]. Scratch and App Inventor are both programming languages and environments [2,8]
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