In recent years, the teaching of programming and development of fundamental programming concepts at the preschool age has attracted the interest of the educational and scientific community. International research has highlighted that teaching programming to young children has a crucial influence on the development of their cognitive functions. There are currently plenty of available programming environments suited for preschoolers. Researchers are adapting their views concerning the age threshold at which young children can effectively get involved with programming. A new programming environment, which was designed to help preschoolers familiarise with basic programming concepts, in a developmentally appropriate manner, is ScratchJr. This study performs a brief introduction to the characteristics of ScratchJr as well as a presentation of the results of a small-scale pilot study for the evaluation of ScratchJr as means of teaching basic programming concepts in the preschool classroom.

Paradoxically, as the role and significance of computing have increased in society and the economy, and coding is recognised as the fourth literacy, the number of students attending a programming course is in decline. In an attempt to increase interest in computer science (CS), there has been made much effort in developing tools and activities as preliminary learning materials in schools and universities. App Inventor and Scratch strive to engage the novice users by allowing them to write programs about things that connect with their interests in contrast to more conventional programming. In this paper, we focus on the use of these two block-based programming environments as tools to facilitate learning programming for novices. In our analysis, both novice programming environments (NPEs) seemed to be attractive platforms for introducing fundamental concepts in computer programming and both look appealing for majors and non-majors as well.