Measuring the Algorithmic Skills of Students Working with Low- and High-Mathability Programming Approaches
Katalin Sebestyén, Gábor Csapó, Mária Csernoch, Kálmán Abari · Acta Polytechnica Hungarica · 2022
In spite of the fact that teaching programming is obligatory in Hungarian public ICT education, the low number of lessons accompanied by the lack of students' knowledge and interest marginalizes the topic.Research and experience show that even when working with experienced teachers, students have a hard time mastering imperative and objectoriented programming languages.These languages usually approach problem-solving from a mathematical perspective, with a minimal design IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and output screen.As an alternative solution, schools and courses apply various visual programming environments that make it possible to create colorful motivating games and animations even in one lesson.In our research, we compared two visual programming environments: Scratch (control group), developed for education, and Construct 3 (experimental group), developed for game and software development.We conducted measurement of the efficacy of the two environments for teaching programming in two grade-8 groups.The students learned the topic by solving traditional algorithmic tasks but taking advantage of the visual interfaces.The results, in accordance with previous findings, show that in developing the students' algorithmic skills there is no difference between these visual programming languages.Furthermore, we found proof that the selected teaching methods play a crucial role in the development of said skills of the students.