Abstract:

Secondary school students often have trouble with learning programming because of the abstract nature of learning the basics without some visible or easily understandable results. Visual representation of a student's work is very important – first as a motivational tool and second – as an immediate result of their own work. To motivate students when learning programming it is good practice to show them how their final result might look like even before discussing what the purpose of that program could be, or the steps they should take to get to the end result.

This article shows how to create a Graphical User Interface (as opposed to some text-based "Menu") as a tool in teaching students how to use programming skills. It will demonstrate how such a Graphical User Interface can be created using a real-time development platform called Unity. The point is to create a graphically attractive interface, to input some choices with desired functions of a future software product and then use programming to create a program that has those functions, as opposed to creating a graphical user interface after all other functions have been coded. The fact that Unity uses C# for coding enables students to code those desired functions using either the MonoDevelop IDE which installs with Unity or Visual Studio – for which Unity enables integration with the Unity platform.

Keywords:

Programming, secondary school, education, Graphical User Interface, Unity, C#.