Use of the Alice Visual Programming Environment in Programming Education : A Descriptive Case Study

Abstract

The process of learning a programming language is seen as complicated, especially for those who first start to learn programming language. For this reason, visual programming tools have begun to be used in educational environments. Visual programming tools purpose to concretize abstract programming language concepts. Alice program is one of the visual programming tools. The aim of this study is to determine the effects of the Alice program on programming learning in the education environment. The study group was 18 freshman students enrolled in the Object Based Programming I course at the vocational school computer technology department. The study lasted 8 weeks, with 4 hours each week. The teaching was realized on Gagne’s nine events of instruction model. At the end of the teaching process, two focus group interviews were conducted with the students to determine the obstructing and facilitating factors in using the Alice program. This study was utilized a descriptive case study. The data were analyzed by using the content analysis. When the results were examined; It was seen that the Alice program makes learning the basic code concepts easy and understanding programming logic, and increases the desire to learn programming. However, it was stated that the practicality of writing code could not be improved because code could not be written in the Alice program. It is thought that employing the Alice program is beneficial for enhancing comprehension of programming logic.