Scratch and Google Blockly: How Girls' Programming Skills and Attitudes are Influenced

Block-based programming has become popular to teach programming to young students in introductory programming environments. Nevertheless, in most western countries, girls show a lack of interest in computer science, including programming. This paper presents the results of two user studies with 24 female German secondary school students in two programming workshops. We use and compare two environments based on Scratch and Google Blockly in fostering the students' programming skills and changing their attitudes towards programming. The two block-based programming editors have been chosen as they are popular in the current educational use of block-based programming. The results support the usage of Scratch-based environment in order to support the acquisition of programming skills. However, those students who used the Blockly-based environment showed greater interest in future programming learning opportunities. The contribution of this paper is showing the different impacts of Scratch and Google Blockly on young female students' interest in programming and the acquisition of programming skills in extra-curricular programming workshops.