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Learning computer science concepts with scratch

Published: 09 August 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Scratch is a visual programming environment that is widely used by young people. We investigated if Scratch can be used to teach concepts of computer science. We developed new learning materials for middle-school students that were designed according to the constructionist philosophy of Scratch and evaluated them in two schools. The classes were normal classes, not extracurricular activities whose participants are self-selected. Questionnaires and a test were constructed based upon a novel combination of the Revised Bloom Taxonomy and the SOLO taxonomy. These quantitative instruments were augmented with a qualitative analysis of observations within the classes. The results showed that in general students could successfully learn important concepts of computer science, although there were some problems with initialization, variables and concurrency; these problems can be overcome by modifications to the teaching process.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICER '10: Proceedings of the Sixth international workshop on Computing education research
August 2010
124 pages
ISBN:9781450302579
DOI:10.1145/1839594
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 09 August 2010

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Author Tags

  1. bloom's taxonomy
  2. concurrency
  3. middle schools
  4. scratch
  5. solo taxonomy

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  • (2024)Assessing the Understanding of Expressions: A Qualitative Study of Notional-Machine-Based Exam QuestionsProceedings of the 24th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3699538.3699554(1-12)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Gender Differences in Story, Game and Visual Adventures in HedyProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on SPLASH-E10.1145/3689493.3689983(1-11)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
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  • (2024)Students’ perspectives on using digital tools in programming coursesDiscover Education10.1007/s44217-024-00144-43:1Online publication date: 22-May-2024
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