Programming with Scratch in primary school, indicators related to effectiveness of education process and analysis of these indicators in terms of various variables

Abstract

Since programming processes involve different thinking skills and different fields of knowledge, it is especially important for children to acquire 21st-century skills. Even though the programming education activities are being intensively applied, it can be said that there is a gap in quantitative researches supporting the effort to reveal the direct or indirect effectiveness of the learning–teaching processes for the programming education. This study, which was done to fill this gap, aims to examine the degree to which students learn programming concepts (PC) and to identify effective variables in that process with a developed curriculum for gifted students studying in the second–third–fourth grade in primary schools. For this purpose, a 15-week application was carried out and each student developed an individual project. In the study, a criterion list, observation forms and peer evaluations were used based on PC to examine projects and learning process. The scores obtained from these tools were used to examine the application of each participant, to comment on the effective variables and the adequacy of the teaching process. The evidence from this study intimates that female participants obtained higher scores than male ones in programming education. Those scores are higher in 9 and 10 age group of students than others. Those who haven’t had Internet access, who have never used computer or have had access to Internet as well as who haven’t had any computer courses had lower scores than others. The upshot of this is that previous computer technology experiences of students may have affected the scores obtained programming education process.

Research trends on learning computer programming with program animation: A systematic mapping study

“…Of the 48 publications used in this literature mapping, 36 articles (see Figure 6) were conducted on students from tertiary institutions [17, 46, 47, 98, 121, 131, 148, 156]. Only nine of these studies were conducted on elementary school students [42, 75, 129, 137, 150], while five articles focused on secondary school students [18, 44, 79, 100]. For example, Cardenas‐Cobo [17] sampled 74 undergraduate students (aged 17–34) in a large university in Ecuador to solve historical programming problems.…”

“…One important trend to note in this study is that Alice and Jeliot were more utilized in previous studies [9, 25, 125, 150], while Scratch was utilized often in more recent studies [16, 17, 42, 142]. Only one recent study from the database employed Alice in combination with Scratch [158].…”

Design, development, and implementation of a simulation application for gifted students in robotics teaching

“…It is seen that more studies are needed to develop and evaluate the education and training activities of gifted students in virtual environments. Considering that the researchers [23, 28, 52] in the literature stated that there are insufficient studies on the use of digital media in the teaching activities of gifted students, it is thought that academic studies on the subject should be increased. In this context, this study aims to contribute to the field by developing a simulation learning environment for gifted students.…”