A Review of Papers About Block Programming From the Workshop on Computing at School

Abstract

This paper describes a survey to identify how Block Programming is being used in Brazilian schools. The motivation of this research is to provide us with data and insights to support the research project on Block Programming and Computational Thinking in Schools whose goal is to investigate and create a proposal for how Block Programming can be inserted into the school curriculum. The relevance of this research is that the school should prepare the students for the skills (creativity, programming, problem solving, abstraction and innovation) demanded by the job market and for further education (e.g. university courses and qualification courses). In particular, in Brazil the curriculum of schools is governed by a normative document called the Common National Curricular Base (Base Nacional Comum Curricular - BNCC). The BNCC defines that the school curriculum should enable the student to have the following competencies: (1) knowledge; (2) scientific, critical, and creative thinking; (3) cultural repertoire; (4) communication; (5) digital culture; (6) work and life project; (7) argumentation; (8) self-knowledge and self-care; (9) empathy and cooperation; and (10) responsibility and citizenship. Some of these skills can be achieved by learning Block Programming aligned with Computational Thinking instruction. The importance of learning programming in school is justified by the increased use of technology in modern society and the need to be prepared to create and use technological solutions that involve programming and computing. The BNCC highlights that the skills developed by students should be organized by offering different curricular arrangements, according to the relevance to the local context and the possibilities of the education systems. This can be applied in a multidisciplinary way through block programming based on computational thinking in basic education. A literature review was conducted of papers published in the area of block programming at the Workshop on Informatics at School (WIE) between the years 2016 to 2019. The choice of this event is due to the fact that it has been standing out over the years as a forum for discussions where works in the area of digital technologies of information and communication (TDIC) in formal and non-formal spaces of education have been disseminated. During this period we identified papers that describe the use of several environments of Block Programming (e.g. Scratch) and several experiences and proposals of how to insert Block Programming in the students' education.