How programming environment shapes perception, learning and goals: logo vs. scratch

  • Authors:

  • Colleen M. Lewis

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California - Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

This study compares the attitudinal and learning outcomes of sixth grade students programming in either Logo or Scratch. Given proposed affordances of the visual programming language, Scratch, I hypothesized that those students learning Scratch would demonstrate greater competence in interpreting loops and conditional statements and would have more positive attitudes towards programming. However, differences in performance between the two groups appeared only in the greater ability of the students that learned Scratch to interpret conditional statements. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that students that learned Logo had on average higher confidence in their ability to program and students were no more likely to plan to continue to program after the course or view the learning of topics as difficult if they learned Logo or Scratch.