Evaluation of Educational Software Designed for the Purpose of Teaching Programming

In this paper we evaluate popular educational software designed for the purpose of teaching programming available in the market that addresses mainly beginners and intermediate students. The evaluation is conducted on the basis of an evaluation framework built in the University of Macedonia, Greece in the context of project “EPENDISI ” that is mainly designed to introduce computer and network technologies into the everyday school practice, especially in secondary education, and also to build a database that contains information and resources on several evaluated educational software on almost all secondary school subjects. The paper first presents the educational software that was evaluated and then it discusses the evaluation framework. Next, it describes the evaluation method and the processing of the data and finally reports some conclusions derived during the evaluation of the educational software