THE EFFECT OF VISUAL DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT FOR UNDERSTANDING PROGRAMMING CONCEPTS BY GRADE 7 STUDENTS

The importance of learning programming lies in the development of students' cognitive abilities, developing intellectual structures and increasing their independent learning. One of the main goals of teaching computer science is the development creativity, high order thinking and problem solving among students. Curriculum for teaching computer science in many countries highlighted these principles in addition to fostering understanding of algorithmic and developing cognitive abilities.

Learning programming exposes students to deep ideas in science and mathematics, which can develop their cognitive ability. Therefore, in the recent years, the demand for programmers and the number of those interested in the programming field rapidly grown and training programs for programmers have become more and more popular. On the other hand, learning programming was considered difficult, and programming courses usually prescribed for high dropout rates.

The difficulties encountered by students can be classified in several categories: syntax difficulties and broken code, debugging ability, writing program difficulty, difficulties in writing a sequence of instructions to resolve a given problem, difficulties in logical thinking and understanding the relationships between tasks and difficulty stripping and breaking down a complex problem.

In the recent years strengthened the view to teach programming according to Object Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm as part of studying computer science. Developing environment was considered one of the impeding factors on learning programming for beginner students, which affects the attitudes of younger students toward computer science. OOP paradigm has many difficulties for the beginner programmer.

In this study, we tried to take advantage of the Alice environment for a significant reduction of the difficulties encountered by children in learning OOP terms. In this Study we used a task based learning method. We assume that this approach will allow the student to internalize the learned programmatic concepts, and strengthen his confidence in dealing with solving programming problems and strengthen its understanding of the learned concepts.

Curriculum, teaching methods and our chosen developing environment (Alice) were designed to reduce significantly the technical difficulties and difficulties in writing programs.

The aims of this study:
• Testing the effect of visual 3-D development environment (Alice) for a significant reduction of the difficulties encountered by young children in learning OOP terms.
• Examining the impact of the development environment Alice on the motivation of junior high school students to learning programming.