Determining the Effect of Programming Language in Educational Robotic Activities

Robotics has been suggested as a field of high potential in education and with high expectancy to impact teaching from kindergarten to university. This paper presents a study conducted with the purpose to have a better understanding of the impact of programming languages among participants of a workshop. An activity, which encompasses ten exercises, was designed and we used three different programming languages (i.e. visual, blocky and text) to program the Thymio robot. A total of six workshops were held using this activity two for each programming language. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected in each workshop. The results suggest that despite the programming language used, participants enjoyed working with robots. Moreover participants with previous experience on programming prefer more advance programming languages.