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Engineering as Art and the Art of Engineering
Published in Diane P. Michelfelder, Neelke Doorn, The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Engineering, 2020
In some sense, the provocative position put forward by C.P. Snow in The Two Cultures (1959) is an early appeal to the need to take scientific knowledge and technological insight seriously as products of culture. His appeal was particularly aimed at ensuring a clear knowledge of basic principles of science in a society he deemed overly focused on the products of culture (i.e., literature, the arts). In other words, he suggested that the laws of thermodynamics should receive equal attention to Shakespeare in early education. While at the time his position met with as much resistance as support, the underlying valuations of the domains of scientific knowledge and humanities remain present in many areas of study and policymaking. Currently, many elements of technological skill are becoming more embedded in secondary school programs, which reflects not only the societal need but also the development of these formerly often specialized fields into a more intuitive approach, possible to convey even to elementary school children. As an example, Scratch was developed as a visual programming language in order to help children to intuitively grasp the structures of computer programming, and is increasingly used not only in high schools, but also in elementary and middle schools.
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Published in Phillip A. Laplante, Dictionary of Computer Science, Engineering, and Technology, 2017
visual programming environment (VPE) software that allows the use of visual expressions (such as graphics, drawings, animation, or icons) in the process of programming. These visual expressions may be used as graphical interfaces for textual programming languages. They may be used to form the syntax of new visual programming languages leading to new paradigms such as programming by demonstration, or they may be used in graphical presentations of the behavior or structure of a program.
Investigating the effect of the use of code.org on younger elementary school students’ attitudes towards programming
Published in Behaviour & Information Technology, 2021
Dragan Lambić, Biljana Đorić, Saša Ivakić
MIT App Inventor is another tool for visual programming in which students program by assembling blocks and puzzle parts (Wolber et al. 2011). This tool enables students with little or no experience in programming to create mobile applications using a drag-and-drop interface (Xie, Shabir, and Abelson 2015), which helps them to create and implement mobile applications with complete functionality into Android operating systems (Kang, Cho, and Kim 2015). The use of visual programming languages helps students to focus on design and programming logic rather than the syntax of a programming language. Some authors believe that the first-studied programming language has a great influence on future programming skills (Koorsse, Cilliers, and Calitz 2015).