Children learning computer science concepts via Alice game-programming

Abstract

Programming environments that incorporate drag-and-drop methods and many pre-defined objects and operations are being widely used in K-12 settings. But can middle school students learn complex computer science concepts by using these programming environments when computer science is not the focus of the course? In this paper, we describe a semester-long game-programming course where 325 middle school students used Alice. We report on our analysis of 231 final games where we measured the frequency of successful execution of programming constructs. Our results show that many games exhibit successful uses of high level computer science concepts such as student-created abstractions, concurrent execution, and event handlers.We discuss the implications of these results for designing effective game programming courses for young students.