Using Virtual World Programming Languages To Teach Computer Science Concepts

1. Abstract With many secondary-level curricula being updated to incorporate a larger amount of computer science concepts, there is a need to identify sufficient ways to teach these concepts within languages commonly used at the appropriate age levels. Currently, languages like Alice, Scratch and Greenfoot, among many others, are both freely available and widely used to teach aspects such as programming, but little research has been done on whether they can actually be used to easily and sufficiently teach other concepts, such as algorithms and data representation. This paper discusses these such languages, and takes a look at how usable they actually are for performing some simple tasks. A number of computer science concepts are looked at in these languages, with implementation possibilities and difficulties overviewed, and discussion on how these languages could be enhanced to make it easier to teach the chosen concepts within them. Education in Computer Science (CS) is currently a large and rather mixed topic. Many secondary schools focus purely on teaching programming, with a varying array of languages such as Alice, Scratch, Java and Python being used, while others additionally teach some other concepts. Many schools also neglect to provide any sort of computer science course. Surveys like those done by the CSTA (http://www.csta.acm.org/) show these also show how much the topics covered can vary between schools [4]. But there are signs of change, with many curricula, such as the K-12 guidelines [14] and countries such as NZ (with a public draft available on the curriculum in [2]), the UK, and the USA being altered or updated to focus more on concepts related to computer science that are not directly programming in addition to the traditional programming skills taught. What CS actually is can often become also a rather confusing topic. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/) explains CS as " the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation " , with a large number of sub-fields including computational theory, computer graphics, programming language theory, and many more. The K-12 guidelines [14] describe CS as " the study of computers and algorithmic processes, including their principles, their hardware and software designs, their applications, and their impact on society. " In these cases the theory, concepts and principles are separated from the programming aspects. CS can also be clouded by how computers are used within schools – as tools for learning or creating documents, spreadsheets, or similar general …