Eliciting student scratch script understandings via scratch charades

D Franklin, J Salac, C Thomas, Z Sekou… - Proceedings of the 51st …, 2020 - dl.acm.org
D Franklin, J Salac, C Thomas, Z Sekou, S Krause
Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2020dl.acm.org
With many school districts nationwide integrating Computer Science (CS) and
Computational Thinking (CT) instruction at the K-8 level, it is crucial researchers closely
inspect the relationship between program expression and student understandings. In this
study, we propose and report on our use of Scratch Charades, a game in which students act
out Scratch scripts while others build them. The purpose of Scratch Charades is to
familiarize students with scripts and blocks without the cognitive overhead of the complex …
With many school districts nationwide integrating Computer Science (CS) and Computational Thinking (CT) instruction at the K-8 level, it is crucial researchers closely inspect the relationship between program expression and student understandings. In this study, we propose and report on our use of Scratch Charades, a game in which students act out Scratch scripts while others build them. The purpose of Scratch Charades is to familiarize students with scripts and blocks without the cognitive overhead of the complex user interface. However, in this study, we also used it to elicit student understandings about Scratch blocks and scripts to design mnemonics to help students debug their code. We propose two building and/or debugging strategies based on our observations.
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