An Evaluation of Primary School Children Coding Using a Text-Based Language (Java)

All primary school children in England are required to write computer programs and learn about computational thinking. There are moves in other countries to this effect such as the U.S. K-12 Computer Science Framework (CSF) for development. Debates on how to program and what constitutes computational thinking are ongoing. Here we report on a study of programing by children aged 7 – 11 using Java and elements of computational thinking they experience. Our platform comprises a novel Story-Writing-Coding engine we have developed. We compare novice (children’s) processes of coding an animated story with that of experts (college students) and evaluate the differences using four measures based on the progressive coding of a complete program. We also analyze the use of novice (children’s) computational thinking in this coding process. This research is set against a backdrop of approaches to teaching programing and concepts of computational thinking in recent educational literatur

The development of Sonic Pi and its use in educational partnerships: Co-creating pedagogies for learning computer programming

Sonic Pi is a new open source software tool and platform originally developed for the Raspberry Pi computer, designed to enable school children to learn programming by creating music. In this article we share insights from a scoping study on the development of Sonic Pi and its use in educational partnerships. Our findings draw attention to the importance of collaborative relationships between teacher and computer scientist and the value of creative pedagogies for learning computer programming as a live-coded participatory enterprise.We would like to thank Broadcom Foundation and Raspberry Pi Foundation for their funding of this scoping study

Novice programming environments: lowering the barriers, supporting the progression

In 2011, the author published an article that looked at the state of the art in novice programming environments. At the time, there had been an increase in the number of programming environments that were freely available for use by novice programmers, particularly children and young people. What was interesting was that they offered a relatively sophisticated set of development and support features within motivating and engaging environments, where programming could be seen as a means to a creative end, rather than an end in itself. Furthermore, these environments incorporated support for the social and collaborative aspects of learning. The article considered five environments—Scratch, Alice, Looking Glass, Greenfoot, and Flip— examining their characteristics and investigating the opportunities they might offer to educators and learners alike. It also considered the broader implications of such environments for both teaching and research. In this chapter, the author revisits the same five environments, looking at how they have changed in the intervening years. She considers their evolution in relation to changes in the field more broadly (e.g., an increased focus on “programming for all”) and reflects on the implications for teaching, as well as research and further development

Torino: A Tangible Programming Language Inclusive of Children with Visual Disabilities

© 2018, Copyright © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Across the world, policy initiatives are being developed to engage children with computer programming and computational thinking. Diversity and inclusion has been a strong force in this agenda, but children with disabilities have largely been omitted from the conversation. Currently, there are no age appropriate tools for teaching programming concepts and computational thinking to primary school children with visual disabilities. We address this gap through presenting the design and implementation of Torino, a tangible programming language for teaching programming concepts to children age 7–11 regardless of level of vision. In this paper, we: (1) describe the design process done in conjunction with children with visual disabilities; (2) articulate the design decisions made; and (3) report insights generated from an evaluation with 10 children with mixed visual abilities that considers how children are able to trace (read) and create (write) programs with Torino. We discuss key design trade-offs: (1) readability versus extensibility; and (2) size versus liveness. We conclude by reflecting upon how an inclusive design approach shaped the final result