We started Jeroo this week. I actually like it a lot. It’s not very hard to figure out so far and the labs we did were easy to understand. I also hope it’s similar to Alice, because Alice is pretty user-friendly and I liked the creative freedom that came with it. I'm glad that it's easy for me right now, because hopefully that means it will also be easy in the future. It would be helpful to understand all the programs leading up to Java so that Java itself will be easier. I don’t want to not understand these programs and then get to Java and REALLY not understand programming… that would be bad.
About Scratch and Alice:
I didn't really like Scratch, but I recognize that it made Alice a lot easier. It was a hard program for me to work with, and I think it may have not been necessary to go so far in depth with it. It was sometimes difficult to remember where each little piece I needed was located. Only some types of code were compatible to run within each other, and I was always confused as to which types those were. I did appreciate that the program was visual, however. This made it easier to visualize what was happening because of the code and to see exactly what it was doing.
Even though we learned how to do many things in Scratch by the time we were finished with it, in Alice, we didn't use all of the skills that Scratch taught us (like extremely complicated loops, lists, etc.), so I think we could've spent less time with it. As for Alice, I liked it a lot more than Scratch because it was easier to see what I was doing since we used actual objects and people, and the more complicated labs weren't nearly as complicated as the Scratch ones were. The layout of the methods and other aspects of code was easy to see and use because they were all broken down into tabs and little menus. This way, everything was categorized and easy to find. I never had too much trouble with Alice; the only difficult parts were figuring out how to loops certain things and sometimes it was difficult to get the Boolean comparisons just right in the methods.
Overall, I liked Alice a lot more than Scratch. The layout of Scratch seemed bulky (does that make sense? I think so…) and sometimes frustrating to navigate because everything was in a different place and there were so many menus. Alice, on the other hand, was conveniently organized and it wasn’t too hard to create methods to make different objects and characters do certain things. I think Alice is more user-friendly and better than Scratch for teaching programming. I recognize that Scratch is necessary to teach basic programming and what methods are and all that, but I don’t think that all of the labs we did were necessary. Once we got to Alice, I really understand how to use loops with methods, and I think I could have learned that just from Alice instead of with Scratch first.
