January 12, 2015 - 08:55
Here is a write-up on African-American student preference for types of programming languages.
This suggests that if you have an introductory Physics course serving students who are interested in a career in, say, media design, then they might prefer a "graphical programming language" like Alice. Alice isn't really so much graphical (like Scratch) but more text-block oriented.
The language compared (Jython) is just Python implemented in Java. This may really be a comparison of programming environments.
However, these data covers such a small group of users that I would take it with a grain of salt.
-Doug
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Post : African-American students preference for graphical or text-based programming languages depended on career goals
URL : https://computinged.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/african-american-students-prefer-graphical-or-text-based-programming-languages-depending-on-career-goals/
Posted : January 12, 2015 at 8:39 am
Author : Mark Guzdial
Tags : Alice, BPC, Glitch, Python
Categories : Uncategorized
One of the results from Betsy DiSalvo's dissertation on Glitch (see a post on that work ( http://computinged.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/beyond-interests-to-values-drawing-african-american-teens-into-cs/ ) ) that I found most interesting was that there wasn't a clear winner between graphical, drag-and-drop programming (Alice) and text-based programming (Python).  She has now written up that part of the dissertation work, and it's linked below.
> To determine appropriate computer science curricula, educators sought to better understand the different affordances of teaching with a visual programming language (Alice) or a text-based language (Jython). Although students often preferred one language, that language wasn't necessarily the one from which they learned the most.
via IEEE Xplore Abstract - Graphical Qualities of Educational Technology: Using Drag-and-Drop and Text-Based Programs for Intro... ( http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6949505&tag=1 ) .