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Investigating the Use of Planning Sheets in Young Learners’ Open-Ended Scratch Projects

Published: 03 August 2022 Publication History

Abstract

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 facilitate novice programmers designing and implementing Scratch programs based on open-ended prompts. To evaluate the planning 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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Cited By

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  • (2024)Investigating the Usability of Coding Applications for Children: Insights from Teacher Interviews2024 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00016(47-58)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
  • (2023)Investigating the Impact of On-Demand Code Examples on Novices' Open-Ended Programming ExperienceProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3568813.3600141(464-475)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICER '22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 1
August 2022
372 pages
ISBN:9781450391948
DOI:10.1145/3501385
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Published: 03 August 2022

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  1. K-8
  2. computer science education
  3. planning

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August 7 - 11, 2022
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  • (2024)Investigating the Usability of Coding Applications for Children: Insights from Teacher Interviews2024 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00016(47-58)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
  • (2023)Investigating the Impact of On-Demand Code Examples on Novices' Open-Ended Programming ExperienceProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3568813.3600141(464-475)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023

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