Use of cutting edge educational tools for an initial programming course

Programming skills are an important component of an engineering curriculum, not only because they enable the customization of software tools to be used in the profession, but also (and perhaps more crucially) because of the «computational thinking» and problem solving capabilities that are ideally developed by young students who learn to program for the first time. The necessity to expand the computing curriculum across a wider range of schools and university courses for students who are not majoring in Computer Science (CS) ) it is well-documented in literature [1], as is the difficulty of teaching 21st century skills (www.p21.org. This work presents an educational approach to teaching initial programming based on the development of fundamental and transversal skills and computer science skills, including creative and computational thinking as well as problem solving and critical thinking. The approach is based on cutting-edge educational tools, namely the visual programming frameworks Scratch, AppInventor, BYOB, and the well-known C/C++ language; curriculum material is drawn from CSPrinciples pilot courses, CS unplugged, school level preparation material for the International Olympiad in Informatics, and are complemented by supplementary information. The pedagogical approaches used in the course are based on constructivist learning theory, experiential learning and guided inquiry. This paper presents a year-long teaching experience in a 10th/13th grade high school with 14 to 16-year-old students. Ways to extend the experience to a university course are also presented. An initial analysis of the course results, both qualitative (based on two student surveys) and quantitative (based on formal written examinations) is presented and discussed. Results are encouraging, showing how visual programming languages help students to improve their problems solving skills and reasoning practices. Exposing the younger generation to computational concepts is fundamental in order to improve the mastering of these concepts and increase the success rate in university studies.