Novice Programming Environments. Scratch & App Inventor

Abstract

The teaching of programming has been acknowledged as a difficult task since its first introduction in schools. The learning results are unsatisfactory, raising questions about the effectiveness of the method used. As it seems, students usually consider programming as a boring and tiring procedure. The problem would be solved if we could make the introductory programming easy and entertaining for the students. This can be achieved by reducing the obstacles for the introduction of programming with the use of special programming environments for the beginners such as Scratch and the App Inventor both of which have been created by MIT. Our research focuses on the similarities and differences between the above mentioned programming environments in our effort to find which of the two is the most appropriate for schools.