A (relatively) unsatisfactory experience of use of Scratch in CS1

Abstract

Scratch is a “rich-media programming language” that has become very popular at high school because students may learn it very quickly and produce surprisingly animated programs. Consequently, some instructors have proposed using Scratch at the university in introductory programming courses. Their experiences report on students’ high motivation and sometimes also on higher performance. We adopted Scratch as the introductory programming language for a CS1 course in a videogames major. It was used for two weeks and then the course switched to using Java. The results we obtained for both the Scratch language and the Dr. Scratch tool were less satisfactory than expected and, in some regards, disappointing. We describe our experience, analyze students’ acceptance and discuss some consequences and lessons learnt to Scratch in university courses.