Turtles, Robots, Sheep, Cats, Languages what is next to teach programming? A future developer's crisis?

摘要

This paper narrates the process that our Computer Science department has followed to drastically change the introductory programming courses. Traditionally, our students were learning to program using the C language, but because of the high failure rate it was decided to first teach basic programming skills using two programming support tools: Raptor and Scratch. Although the passing rate has increased, it has not been possible to determine if this new teaching strategy has eased our students to learn programming in C or C++. We have also noticed that Raptor does not offer all the basic features required in the syllabus of our department, therefore an analysis of other programming support tools which may offer a richer set of characteristics is provided.