Open-ended tasks can be both beneficial and challenging to students learning to program. Such tasks allow students to be more creative and feel ownership over their work, but some students struggle with unstructured tasks and, without proper scaffolds, this can lead to negative learning experiences. Scratch is a widely used coding platform to teach computer science in classrooms and is designed to support learner creativity and expression. With its open-ended nature, Scratch can be used in various ways in the classroom to meet the needs of schools and districts. One challenge of using Scratch in classrooms is supporting learners in exploring their interests and fostering creativity while still meeting the instructional goals of a lesson and ensuring all students are engaged with, and understand, focal concepts and practices.
In this paper, we investigate the use of planning sheets to fa- cilitate novice programmers designing and implementing Scratch programs based on open-ended prompts. To evaluate the plan- ning sheets, we look at how closely students’ implemented Scratch projects match their plans and whether the implemented Scratch projects met the technical requirements for the given lesson. We analyzed 303 Scratch projects from 155 middle grade students (ages 10-14) who were introduced to programming via the Scratch Encore Curriculum. Completed Scratch projects that used planning sheets (202) were qualitatively coded to evaluate how closely they matched the initial plan, and Scratch programs (303) were analyzed with an automated grader to check if technical project requirements were met. Our results reveal that students that used planning sheets met significantly more technical project requirements and had more complex structures than those that did not have planning sheets. Results differ based on teacher and type of planning sheet used (physical vs. virtual). This work suggests that planning sheets are a helpful tool for young learners when completing open-ended coding projects.
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PlanIT! A New Integrated Tool to Help Novices Design for Open-ended Projects
Project-based learning can encourage and motivate students to learn through exploring their own interests, but introduces special challenges for novice programmers. Recent research has shown that novice students perceive themselves to be "bad at programming, especially when they do not know how to start writing a program, or need to create a plan before getting started. In this paper, we present PlanIT, a guided planning tool integrated with the Snap! programming environment designed to help novices plan and program their open-ended projects. Within PlanIT, students can add a description for their project, use a to do list to help break down the steps of implementation, plan important elements of their program including actors, variables, and events, and view related example projects. We report findings from a pilot study of high school students using PlanIT, showing that students who used the tool learned to make more specific and actionable plans. Results from student interviews show they appreciate the guidance that PlanIT provides, as well as the affordances it offers to more quickly create program elements.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1917885
- PAR ID:
- 10279567
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGCSE '21: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 232 to 238
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)Open-ended programming increases students' motivation by allowing them to solve authentic problems and connect programming to their own interests. However, such open-ended projects are also challenging, as they often encourage students to explore new programming features and attempt tasks that they have not learned before. Code examples are effective learning materials for students and are well-suited to supporting open-ended programming. However, there is little work to understand how novices learn with examples during open-ended programming, and few real-world deployments of such tools. In this paper, we explore novices' learning barriers when interacting with code examples during open-ended programming. We deployed Example Helper, a tool that offers galleries of code examples to search and use, with 44 novice students in an introductory programming classroom, working on an open-ended project in Snap. We found three high-level barriers that novices encountered when using examples: decision, search, and integration barriers. We discuss how these barriers arise and design opportunities to address them.more » « less
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Given the increasing interest and need to teach students computer science in formal education settings, it is imperative to understand how to do so effectively and equitably. An important step of learning to program is being able to define the objective of a program and then plan out how to implement a program to produce the desired outcome. This step is particularly important in younger learners who may have little experience with programming or trying to create their own technological artifacts. In this paper, we explore how to scaffold young programmers in planning their open-ended programs as part of an intermediate Scratch curriculum for middle grade students. We analyze 203 paper and virtual planning documents from 103 5th-8th grade students. Our results reveal that the students often completed a majority of the document, which was consistent across grade levels. However, we found differences in student completion based on teacher and between physical and virtual documents. This work advances our understanding of how to support novice, young programmers in planning programs.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3408877.3432552
