Defining Procedures in Early Computing Education

From the early years of educational programming researchers considered procedural abstraction a key instrument of computational thinking and tried to understand the cognitive difficulties encountered through this concept. Defining procedures is promoted in renewed computing curricula in several countries. And yet, it is rarely acknowledged by more recent educational research. In this paper, we consider the fact that the delayed implementation of a mechanism for building procedures (known as definitions) within Scratch, a widely used programming environment for children, may have negatively impacted the focus within curricular content on this powerful idea. In our research, which is a part of a broader ScratchMaths (SM) research project, we set out to explore which factors play a role in upper primary pupils understanding and utilizing the concept of defining procedures as a common and inherent instrument of their programming. We present our observations from the project design schools and demonstrate how they guided the development of our SM pedagogic strategy for definitions

Designing a Programming Game to Improve Children’s Procedural Abstraction Skills in Scratch

© The Author(s) 2020. The recent shift in compulsory education from ICT-focused computing curricula to informatics, digital literacy and computer science, has resulted in children being taught computing using block-based programming tools such as Scratch, with teaching that is often limited by school resources and teacher expertise. Even without these limitations, Scratch users often produce code with ‘code smells’ such as duplicate blocks and long scripts which impact how they understand and debug projects. These code smells can be removed using procedural abstraction, an important concept in computer science rarely taught to this age group. This article describes the design of a novel educational block-based programming game, Pirate Plunder, which concentrates on how procedural abstraction is introduced and reinforced. The article then reports an extended evaluation to measure the game’s efficacy with children aged 10 and 11, finding that children who played the game were then able to use procedural abstraction in Scratch. The article then uses game analytics to explore why the game was effective and gives three recommendations for educational game design based on this research: using learning trajectories and restrictive success conditions to introduce complex content, increasing learner investment through customisable avatars and suggestions for improving the evaluations of educational games

Exploring perceived cognitive load in learning programming via Scratch

The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceived cognitive load and its effects on the academic performance in Scratch-based programming. The four main concepts of programming (sequences, operators, conditions and loop) were delivered in the instructional package. Participants were 12 sixth-grade students enrolled at a public secondary school. The results from quantitative and qualitative instruments indicated that students’ perceived cognitive loads were close to each other among four programming concepts. The attractive interface of Scratch was somewhat useful but some parts of the interface were problematic for achieving the programming tasks. This study concludes with suggestions for Scratch practitioners and researchers to pay attention to the sources of cognitive load effects