There are many many tools, books, games and apps to teach children programming. But in our view they focus way to much on getting the programs to work, and too little on teaching children about software engineering skills: programming is a good way, free of code smells, and easy to read. To address this, we […]
Do Code Smells Hamper Novice Programming?
Code smells, we all know them, and they are bad 🙂  We know from research on professional developers that code smell can make performance on reading and maintaining code worse. So the question we wanted to answer was: does this hold for novice users programming Scratch as well? tr;dr: Yes! Code clones and long methods […]
Scratch Intro material: Lesson 2 (Dutch)
The kids at my robotics club loved playing with my first Scratch lesson, so I made a second lesson. In this lesson, little fish Gerrie needs to eat all purple fishes, while not touching the poisonous dotted fish. The kids really liked it, even the one that missed last week’s lesson picked it up quickly. They ended […]
Scratch intro material: Lesson 1 (Dutch)
For my recent research adventures into programming for kids, I have made a small intro into Scratch programming. As a good teacher I of course did not like the existing material 🙂 Also, I needed something that introduced all necessary concepts for my experiment. In this lesson we need to help Giga escape a maze […]
