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1. Eliciting Student Scratch Script Understandings via Scratch Charades

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366911  

   Franklin, Diana; Salac, Jean; Thomas, Cathy; Sekou, Zene; Krause, Sue (February 2020, SIGCSE '20: Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education)

   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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2. Scratch Encore: The Design and Pilot of a Culturally-Relevant Intermediate Scratch Curriculum

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366912  

   Franklin, Diana; Weintrop, David; Palmer, Jennifer; Coenraad, Merijke; Cobian, Melissa; Beck, Kristan; Rasmussen, Andrew; Krause, Sue; White, Max; Anaya, Marco; et al (February 2020, The 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’20))

   While several introductory computer science curricula exist for children in K-8, there are few options that go beyond sequence, loops, and basic conditionals. The goal of this project is to not only fill this gap with a high-quality curriculum supported by complete instructional materials, but to also do so with an equity-balanced curriculum. That is, a curriculum that values advancing equity equally with student learning outcomes. In this paper, we intro- duce barriers to equity in public school classrooms, pedagogical approaches to culturally-relevant curricula, and how our Scratch Encore curriculum is designed to support equity-balanced learn- ing. Finally, we present results of our pilot year, including early evidence of students taking advantage of the culturally-relevant design aspects. 

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3. QIS: Automated Refactoring for Scratch

   https://doi.org/10.1109/VLHCC.2019.8818906  

   Techapalokul, Peeratham; Tilevich, Eli (October 2019, 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC))
4. Integrating Parsons Puzzles with Scratch

   Bender, Jeff; Zhao, Bingpu; Madduri, Lalitha; Dziena, Alex; Liebeskind, Alex; Kaiser, Gail (January 2021, 29th International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE))

   null (Ed.)

   We surveyed grade 6-9 teachers to learn teacher perceptions of student engagement with computational thinking (CT) and how well their needs are met by existing CT learning systems. The results and a literature review lead us to extend the trend of balancing Scratch’s agency with structure to better serve learners and reduce burden on teachers aiming to learn and teach CT. In this paper, we integrate Parsons Programming Puzzles (PPPs) with Scratch and analyze the effects on adults, who crucially influence the education of their children. The results from our small pilot study suggest PPPs catalyze CT motivation, reduce extraneous cognitive load, and increase learning efficiency without jeopardizing performance on transfer tasks. 

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5. COMMIT0: LIBRARY GENERATION FROM SCRATCH

   Zhao, Wenting; Jiang, Nan; Lee, Celine; Chiu, Justin T; Cardie, Claire; Galle, Matthias; Rush, Alexander M (April 2025, ICLR)