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.

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