Abstract:

The goal of this paper lies in the introduction of modern methods of education in the field of problems concerning algorithm development and programming on mobile devices. Rapid expansion of mobile technologies has led to the growth of mobile business (mBusiness) and mobile learning (mLearning) popularity. This has caused a high demand for various customized apps running under mobile operation systems. Therefore, lots of application developers are needed.

App development and programming has been carried out only by IT specialist in the recent past. Moreover, the process of teaching the traditional programming languages has been very complicated and highly inaccessible for “ordinary” students. On the other hand, each student is used to work (and have fun) with modern mobile devices today and most of them think about the possibility of creating their own applications. They are disappointed when trying to understand the syntax of a programming language and they often refuse to learn more after their first experience.

The solution lies in the use of Visual Programming which allows non-programmers to develop applications using modern development tools. Their logic is based on existing visual elements which are built into complex blocks. Students can create algorithms without a specific knowledge of programming language syntax. This approach changes the relation of students to school subjects based on programming which is also reflected in their evaluation.

Another factor which stands behind the growth of mobile app development popularity is gamification. All the main important skills can be trained on simple (later more complex) mobile games. All mobile components are accessible through abstract blocks which means that the app developer does not have to think about technical details of GPS, gyroscope or other mobile device components and functionality like sound/video playing, vibrations, touch or drag detection etc.

At the end of the paper, the experiences with both types of teaching methods – traditional and visual programming – will be compared and described. All examples, experiences and evaluation results were obtained from the author’s pedagogical practice.

Keywords:

Visual programming, gamification, algorithmization, programming, mobile app development.