Teaching Introductory Programming Concepts with Lego MindStorms in Greek High Schools: A Two-Year Experience

Even today, teaching the basic principles of programming still presents numerous difficulties for students, which in the last several decades have comprised the subject of extensive research (Mayer, 1989; Mendelsohn et al., 1990; Du Boulay, 1989; Du Boulay et al. 1989; Brusilovsky et al., 1994). On the one hand attempts have been made to investigate the factors that render the learning of programming principles difficult, and on the other, to examine the effectiveness of programming languages and integrated environments, as well as the actual methods applied to the teaching of programming. The difficulties, according to (Du Boulay, 1989; Du Boulay et al. 1989) fall into one of the following categories: 1. Orientation: what programming is; the types of problems that can be solved; the positive effects of learning programming. 2. Notional machine: difficulties in understanding the general properties of the “machine” which the student learns to control and its relation to the physical machine. 3. Rules of the programming language (notation): syntax and semantics as an extension of the properties and behaviour of the notional machine. 4. Learning the established structures. 5. Pragmatics: acquiring the ability to determine, develop, control and debug a program with the available tools. Many researchers agree with the view that one of the most significant factors which contributes or even gives rise to the above-mentioned difficulties is the use of the classic approach (Brusilovsky et al., 1997; Xinogalos, 2002) to the teaching of programming. By this we mean teaching based on: • The use of a general purpose language (such as Pascal, C, etc); • The use of a professional environment for this language; and • The proposed problems that require the processing of numbers and/or symbols. Much research has shown that the problems arising from general-purpose languages are due to the fact that they are complex and novices need to learn a lot in order to be able to