Terminology:) What? Where? How?

(Sep 3 - Sept 12 )

My task during this week is to do reseach about existing block programming languages, read the article called, Predicting quality in educational software: Evaluating for Learning, Usability and the Synergy between them by David Squires and Jenny Preece, and get familiarized with Scratch and Blockly.

Resume of the above mentioned article

Squires and Preece discusse a new approach for teachers to be able to evaluate predictively educational software base on heuristics so that they can make decisions about what software to purchase and how to use software in classrooms. The conventional approach to predictive evaluation is to use a checklist. This article argue that checklists are seriously flawed in principle because they do not encompass a consideration of learning issues and because they fail to adopt a socio-constructivist view of learning. So the article proposes an approach that adapts the idea of usability heuristics by taking account of a socio-constructivist learning perspective. This leads to a set of ‘learning with software’ heuristics. A notable feature of these heuristics is that they attend to the integration of usability and learning issues Any technique used by teachers needs to be relatively quick and easy to use. Heuristic evaluation is designed to address key usability issues in a cost effective way. High level guidelines or heuristics focus reviewers’ attention as they work their way through the system, using their expertise to role-play the behaviour of a typical user. The latest version of usability heuristics published are as follows: