introductory programming efforts
« Teaching with Scratch
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Roberto Catanuto
Member
September 20, 2010
hello, i'd like to introduce a few students to programming with Scratch, especially for its drag and drop visual way of working;
before doing that, i need some help to understand the underlying differences between Scratch and Alice, which is fairly similar;
thank you in advance for your expertise !
In general I think Scratch is great for students with little or no background who want to get a fast start and be able to do lots of things quickly. Whereas Alice is meant more as an introductory tool for learning computer science.
Scratch:
• Written in Squeak
• Limited amount of functionality; specifically no i/o, no paratmeter passing or return values, no recursion, no exception handling, no inheritance
• Since there is limited functionality the students can't ever go wrong.
• Easy to learn interface
• 2-D
Alice:
• Written in Java
• Most of the functionality of Java is available in Alice
• Students can run into some serious errors
• The interface can be overwhelming for some students
• 3-D