Perceptions of students and teachers about the use of a kid's programming language in computer courses

Computer technology is playing an important role in the lives of children since computers have become increasingly available at almost all schools. According to statistics of the Ministry of National Education (MONE) in 2008, there are more than 550.000 computers in elementary and secondary schools in Turkey. Computers are used in several ways in classrooms. However, today, in many schools, “computer aided instruction means making the computer teach the child” (Papert, 1993, p.5). Also, it is claimed that although children meet computers and technology in early ages, still, the child computer interaction has not been optimal (Druin, 1999). The successful learning model is that the way children actively construct knowledge by combining new information with existing one. Children learn to talk and a process without covering the organized curriculum. By this model, learning process is supported by experiences and social interactions rather than by memorization, drill and practice. Also, curriculum and teaching becomes more student centered to connect the school to real life situations and support students to become better thinkers and problem solvers (Falk, 2009; Papert, 1993; Piaget, 1973; Vosniadou, 2001; Vygotsky, 1978). Although many different approaches have been suggested for developing students’ computer skills by the usage of programming languages, computer programming has not been popular and mostly ignored in computer classrooms in Turkey. The reason for this situation is based on some thoughts: programming is difficult for most children. That is, although new generation programming languages are mathematically very elegant, they are still difficult to learn and master (Siegle, 2009; Kahn, 1995). It does not promote any students’ skills; there is no persuasive evidence “that writing programs will automatically improve the students’ creativity or general reasoning ability or higher order cognitive skills” (Shafto, 1986, p. 297), and it is not directly related with education curriculum. When considering the list of many programming languages, software development tools, techniques and supporting technologies which have developed in the last decade, it is accepted that computer science is technological profession and a field of study which needs to be promoted not only in higher education but also in secondary, elementary education. The current crisis in computer science enrollment is bringing new attentions to programming languages and for beginner programmers, it is needed and important to provide programming languages and environments which are usable and interesting (Siegle, 2009; Schwartz et. al., 2006). The problem which we are now faced with is that while we have distributed computing technologies everywhere so rapidly, we have spent very little time for beginner programmers in this process (Schwartz et. al., 2006). Therefore, for a beginner programmer, the learning of how to code a program has become difficult, discouraging and painful resulting in decreasing the number of programmers while increasing the computers we have. To make beginner learners of programming languages more adaptive the advance computing technologies and to reduce the technical difficulties that beginner programmers are faced with educational and kid’s programming languages have been developed (Siegle, 2009; Schwartz et. al., 2006). Kid’s programming languages are designed primarily as a learning instrument and they are low level programming languages used for just educational purposes. They offer entertaining environments to beginner learners and help them to learn more professional ones easily. This is also important to encourage and prepare them in order to use more powerful and mainstream programming languages and technologies in the future (Papert, 1993). Although such kinds of technologies are created to be used and they provide a lot of advantages for their users, this does not mean computer systems make the child teach and improve their skills if they are not used (Papert, 1993). According to Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the usefulness of these types of technologies can be investigated by the indicator factors reported in perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use constructs of TAM (Davis, 1989). Therefore, it is also needed to investigate the usefulness and ease of use of these new technologies. Also, their effects on users’ motivation should be also investigated carefully before integrating them into learning processes.