Block-based programming languages like Scratch, Alice and Blockly are becoming increasingly common as introductory languages in programming education. In this talk we will focus on Scratch, and explore the programs that kids write. Are they simple or complex? Do they suffer from code smells? Do they really apply programming concepts or do they just play with the blocks? Do kids develop good programming habits? Are there common code patterns? To answer those questions, we have we scraped the Scratch public repository and retrieved 250,000 projects. Also, we have conducted controlled experiments with students of a Dutch high school, and we are running the edx MOOC “Scratch: Programmeren voor kinderen”. In this talk we will discuss the lessons we learned about how kids code and we will showcase extreme cases we discovered in the Scratch repository.
Bio van Efthimia Aivaloglou
I am a postdoctoral researcher at Software Engineering Research Group at TU Delft. In the course of my career, I have worked as a software engineer, a systems engineer, and a networks security researcher. Currently, I am researching end-user programming, block-based languages, spreadsheets and spreadsheet-to-code transformations.
