There is broad agreement on the importance of teaching programming as part of primary and secondary education, and even preschool, as it provides tools for problem solving and abstract thinking, among other benefits. Arduino boards are widely used in educational contexts, given their open hardware design as well as the myriad of technical and educational resources that are freely available, and because they make it possible to work with physical programming as well as with full-scale projects. Given that there are many environments for programming Arduino boards, both text and block-based, it is imperative for educators to have criteria for evaluating and comparing them. Some evaluation approaches focus on technical software characteristics, while others are overly detailed regarding general software quality, but do not assess important aspects related to their use in educational contexts. In this work, we present the results of a detailed survey on block-based programming environments aimed at educators interested in using Arduino boards, with a focus on aspects that affect programming teaching and learning practices. Our results show that most of the available block-based programming environments have serious flaws and limitations that hinder teaching and learning. However, some of them include features that may be valuable in various types of courses and other educational settings.

There is agreement on the importance of teaching programming as part of the mandatory basic education (i.e., initial, primary and secondary school), as it gives tools to problem solving and abstract thinking, among other things. There are several programming tools that are usually used in schools, Scratch being one of the most famous. In general, Arduino boards are widely used in educational contexts, given their open hardware design as well as the myriad of technical and educational resources that are available freely, and that they allow to work with physical programming as well as with full scale projects. Arduino boards are usually programmed using the Arduino IDE, that is text-based, as well as with block based tools such as mBlock, proprietary tools for Arduino-compatible boards and even extensions of Scratch. Those tools have limitations in order to be used in schools, given that they require the learning of text or block syntax, even when the latter has a softer learning curve. Particularly, some block programming tools are specific to certain kits or boards, do not include a variety of blocks for generic sensors and actuators, have very few blocks that facilitate the programming or are not available in widely used languages such as Spanish. In this work we present the block based Arduino programming Arduino en la Escuela (AelE, that could be translated from Spanish as “Arduino at the School”), that excels in versatility, given that it was used with students from ages, sociocultural context, as well as previous knowledge. The tool was used for courses mostly with secondary school students, but it was also applied in other contexts as with younger children and adults, as well as with teachers and even as part of a prison education program. In all these experiences AelE was well accepted by the students, and the tool was totally suitable in order to complete the required class assignments as well as to work with projects of different kinds.