Programming vs Authoring

The ability to manipulate programs and their interactivity was seen essential in a programming language for children. In order to gather information that would assist in designing a programming environment for children, an attempt was made to find out what children are able to understand about programming. We distinguish between authoring and programming. Whilst authoring is the easier process of arranging and structuring content in an interactive environment, programming is the more advanced technique of writing source code of a computer program. An ideal tool would scale in programming ‘granularity’ in order to grow in capability along with the user’s capability of programming.

Further properties of children programming tools are an appropriate computational metaphor and the support of recognition rather than recall, minimizing programming efforts by using computational media, and providing high-level instruction and collection of resources as part of the programming environment. Furthermore, constructivist believe that children can be taught to use their iconic and symbolic mentalities when solving problems. These properties can be valuable in creative thinking.