Spaghetti for the main course?: observations on the naturalness of scenario-based programming

Authors:
Michal Gordon;Assaf Marron;Orni Meerbaum-Salant
Affiliations:
Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel;Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel;Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
Venue:
Proceedings of the 17th ACM annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Year:
2012

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Abstract

Scenario-based programming is an approach to software development which calls for developing independent software modules to describe different behaviors that a system should or should not follow, and then coordinating the interwoven execution of these modules at run time. We show that patterns previously shown to exist in programs written in the Scratch environment, which is not specifically scenario oriented, by children who did not have other training, and were not guided to write in a scenario-based manner, are also characteristic to scenario-based programming. These patterns include extremely fine-grain decomposition and bottom-up development. This result suggests that scenario-based programming concepts are "natural" in some ways. Thus, with an appropriate environment and a matching set of tools, scenario-based programming concepts could have an important role in early-stage computer-programming curricula.