Novice programming environments (NPEs) like
Scratch and Alice witnessed tremendous growth in adoption
and popularity in recent years. These NPEs have successfully
lowered the barrier of initial entry to programming. They have
also allowed novice computing students to exercise their creative
freedom more meaningfully by enabling them to work on projects
which have more real life context.
Recent trends in adoption of smartphone and other mobile
devices among our youth points to a time in near future when
majority of them will be mobile device users. Hence, if the NPEs
want to remain relevant among youth, they need to adapt to and
cater to a mobile-device centric audience. Google and MIT’s App
Inventor for Android is one of the early NPEs that is trying to
achieve this by offering a Scratch-like environment for mobile
apps development. GameSalad is another free software primarily
for Mac platform that can also offers a drag-n-drop rule-based
environment for creating apps. In this paper we compare these
two environments’ suitableness for computing introduction. Our
comparison is based on several logistical, instructional, and
operational factors and points to the fact that both these mobile
NPEs have their strong points as well as weaknesses. We believe
the effectiveness and success of these mobile NPEs will vary
depending on particular situations, and hence our work will aid
someone looking for a mobile NPE in making a more judicious
choice