Week 2

This week I spent some of my time reading literature. This included the citations in the project description. I focused on the article "Evaluating the effectiveness of a new instructional approach". It spoke on using a block programming for animation to get students more interested and to increase retention. They found that after using the program, Alice, more students stayed in their major and did better overall. This speaks to one of our reasons for this research projects: making students in computer organization more interested and less defeated by the new topics.

During the other parts of my research time, I looked into Ardublock to get better acquainted with the program. The blog.ardublock.com site lacks a lot of documentation for the program. Even with the little that is provided on the site, it was hard to understand how to connect the program to the Arduino IDE. Nonetheless, I found the source code for Ardublock on github. I also found the source code for a similar program called Ardublockly that is based on Google's blockly.

Next Up:

I am going to look at both source code from Ardublock and Ardublockly and see how they compare. Since I am very familiar with blockly, I will look into Ardublockly as an alternative to using Ardublock. This will help my team and I be able to write the front end code.

I will also continue reading literature to build up my knowledge.