Abstract—Programming is a course that prosecutes skills in critical thinking and problem-solving. However, learning programming for novices like junior high school students is no easy task. Moreover, the strategy uses text-based programming, which requires writing source code correctly to avoid the potential of syntax errors. This study aims to investigate a tool of block-based visual programming (BBVP) for learning the programming concepts. The method used in this study consists of five phases: analysis, design, development, experiment, and evaluation. Participants were 60 students of middle school age 14-15 years old divided into two groups, experimental and control groups. Data was collected through questionnaires, pretest-posttest, and analysis of codes in the project created by students. To compare the results of both two different groups, we employed independent samples t-test. The result shows that the significance score is less than 0.05 (p-value < 0.05), which means that learning programming concepts using BBVP significantly impacts novices. The concepts of programming that can be learned include variables, sequence, iteration or looping, and conditional statements.
Index Terms—Block-based visual programming, learning programming, ScratchJr, programming concepts, visual programming.
The authors are with the Department of Informatics Engineering Education, Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta, Indonesia (e-mail: sukirman@ums.ac.id, dap207@ums.ac.id, a710160038@student.ums.ac.id, a710160027@student.ums.ac.id).
Cite: Sukirman, Dias Aziz Pramudita, Aziz Afiyanto, and Utaminingsih, "Block-Based Visual Programming as a Tool for Learning the Concepts of Programming for Novices," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 365-371, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).