A Guided Scratch Visual Execution Environment to Introduce Programming Concepts to CS1 Students

First-year computer science (CS1) university students traditionally have difficulties understanding how to program. This paper describes research introducing CS1 programming concepts using a Scratch language guided visual execution environment (VEE). The addressed are those from an introductory course (sequences, variables, operators, conditionals, loops, and events parallelism). VEE guides novice through concepts, explaining guiding interactive exercises executed in by metaphors serious games. objective of this study is, firstly, investigate if cohort 124 students, three distinct groups, studying at the same university, able improve their skills VEE. Secondly, is improvement different for various concepts? All were taught module tutor four 2-h sessions (8 h), qualitative approach was adopted. results show significantly improved knowledge, significant all although greater certain such as loops than others. It also shows that lacked initial knowledge parallelism, though most had used during high school years. sequence concept popular known them. A collateral finding students’ previous learning gaps affected grades they required access begin level.