What are your thoughts?
No and yes, 'cause I've seen it being implemented live with kids and is a big YES 'cause they kind of knew what they were doing and also it was implemented with animations and characters from Plants vs Zombies so in a way it really worked for the kids but they actually didn't know why or how it was happening everything and might be a mislead to show how actual programming is done and they didn't know they were not programming and didn't really learn a thing about cycles they just tried and replaced every block till it worked.
So is a big NO if is a fast course and they don't have a proper teacher to taught them the real way or explain to them really well and in an easy way.
As always, it depends. It's a gamble, to be sure. Then again, reading and following documentation from any given language / framework is the same gamble. I can't tell you how many times documentation has just been so, so wrong.
It's false learning. Same thing goes for learning a language, you don't start learning basic things like a baby would because your mind is developed enough to understand more complex concepts
Always there are two parts to writing software. First is the logical part and the second is the language / syntax. To grasp the logical part drag and drop is good but not for the second part.
Voted Yes.
Here is why.
Drag&Drop 'programming' solved many technical issues for the 'noob' and he can fully concentrate on the concept of teaching a machine how to behave.
Sure, it doesn't explain why things happen (technically) but it helps people new to programming understand the basic building blocks.
Mikhail Medvedev
infused.io
Unreal Engine 4 has a Blueprints Editor which is seamlessly integrated with their open-source c++ core. You can expose values from your c++ code to the Blueprints Editor as "nodes" to drag around and connect.
A lot of people get into UE4 and use blueprints to begin their new projects and seem to be getting into the programming mindstate with a gentler curve. I saw a portion of projects beginning as blueprints-only and slowly gravitate towards a more sane blueprints/c++ mix. It was cool seeing people with no programming knowledge post questions and engage in the problem solving process that is so core to being a developer.
This is all anecdotal evidence from what I've seen in UE4 forums, UE4 answerhub, stackoverflow etc, but I'm of the opinion this approach is helpful and encouraging to a portion of users. Personally, it was quite nice exploring the engine API in a lighter overview while being able to plug things together and rearrange them to test my boundaries, so I would do it again.