Student Attitudes towards the Use of Graphical Programming Languages In an Introductory Engineering Course

In the fall and spring of 2007 freshmen CS, CPE, and EE students, at Virginia Tech, had the unique experience of working with five or six programming languages, all within one year and all for the purpose of developing fundamental programming skills. One of those languages was purely educational in nature (Alice), three were traditional and text-based (C++, Java, and MATLAB script), but two were unique graphical languages (RAPTOR and LabVIEW). This paper briefly describes how teaching with graphical programming languages is consistent with the learning theories of constructivism and multiple intelligences. This paper also describes how a survey was used to take advantage of this unique opportunity to measure freshman student perceptions of relevance, general attitude, and recommendations for further use of each of these six programming languages. This paper concludes by describing the results of that survey and by discussing some implications of the results.