As computer science instruction gets offered to more young learn- ers, transitioning from elective to requirement, it is important to explore the relationship between pedagogical approach and student behavior. While different pedagogical approaches have particular motivations and intended goals, little is known about to what degree they satisfy those goals.
In this paper, we present analysis of 536 students’ (age 9-14, grades 4-8) work within a Scratch-based, Use-Modify-Create (UMC) curriculum, Scratch Encore. We investigate to what degree the UMC progression encourages students to engage with the content of the lesson while providing the flexibility for creativity and exploration.
Our findings show that this approach does balance structure with flexibility and creativity, allowing teachers wide variation in the degree to which they adhere to the structured tasks. Many students utilized recently-learned blocks in open-ended activities, yet they also explored blocks not formally taught. In addition, they took advantage of open-ended projects to change sprites, backgrounds, and integrate narratives into their projects.
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Investigating the Use of Planning Sheets in Young Learners’ Open-Ended Scratch Projects
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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- Award ID(s):
- 1738758
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10382313
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ICER 2022
- Volume:
- 1
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 247 to 263
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3501385.3543972
