Designing exercises for block-based languages: The case of ScratchJr

Abstract

Both formative and summative assessment may take many forms. One approach, known as “many small programs”, consists of providing many programming exercises per week to students, so that they may exercise the different concepts and skills of the course. Different kinds of exercises have been proposed, some of them general purpose, some of them specific to programming. For the latter, the programming paradigm has a decisive influence on the design of these exercises, and even on the feasibility of designing them. In this context, block-based programming represents a new challenge, because the execution state of block-based programs does not depend on such tangible elements as variable contents or reducible expressions. Although some block-based languages allow declaring and using variables, the most relevant elements of the execution state have a visual nature. In the paper, we review several taxonomies of programming exercises and block-based questionnaires to propose a range of exercises specific to blockbased programming. Our experience in developing these kinds of exercises also is reported. The proposal does not intend to constitute a novel and complete taxonomy, but an initial effort in the design of programming exercises for this programming paradigm.