Is the Scratch Programming Environment Ideal for all? Enhancements to the Scratch IDE to Make it Easier to Use and More Useful for Students and Teachers

Stefano Federici, Elisabetta Gola, Elisabetta Sergi

2023

Abstract

Even the most successful programming environment for beginners, Scratch, when compared to other block-based IDEs, is not always the ideal tool for everyone. Scratch Team’s development policy -creating a single environment for all users where no customization is allowed- makes Scratch a great environment for most users to start with computer programming, but not the ideal environment for those users that -thanks to Scratch’s outstanding features- want to use it to create complex projects, or for teachers that use it for their lessons. In this paper we will highlight the weaknesses of Scratch for expert developers and for teachers. We will then look at other popular block-languages and tools to find which weaknesses they can help to solve. Finally, we will propose some new enhancements, that are still not available in Scratch and in the tools we analysed.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Federici S., Gola E. and Sergi E. (2023). Is the Scratch Programming Environment Ideal for all? Enhancements to the Scratch IDE to Make it Easier to Use and More Useful for Students and Teachers. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-758-641-5, SciTePress, pages 171-181. DOI: 10.5220/0011838200003470

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu23,
author={Stefano Federici and Elisabetta Gola and Elisabetta Sergi},
title={Is the Scratch Programming Environment Ideal for all? Enhancements to the Scratch IDE to Make it Easier to Use and More Useful for Students and Teachers},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,},
year={2023},
pages={171-181},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011838200003470},
isbn={978-989-758-641-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,
TI - Is the Scratch Programming Environment Ideal for all? Enhancements to the Scratch IDE to Make it Easier to Use and More Useful for Students and Teachers
SN - 978-989-758-641-5
AU - Federici S.
AU - Gola E.
AU - Sergi E.
PY - 2023
SP - 171
EP - 181
DO - 10.5220/0011838200003470
PB - SciTePress