An Investigation of Italian Primary School Teachers’ View on Coding and Programming

Corradini, Isabella; Lodi, Michael; Nardelli, Enrico

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-02750-6_18

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…For example, TT seem to overestimate the importance of students' digital literacy. This might be related to even in-service teachers having difficulties regarding terms such as 'programming' or 'computational thinking' [9,24]. The surveyed TP, in contrast, focused on more general cognitive skills such as reasoning and problem solving, which are strongly associated with CT [33].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenging but Full of Opportunities: Teachers’ Perspectives on Programming in Primary Schools

Greifenstein

Graßl

2021

Proceedings of the 21st Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research

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The widespread establishment of computational thinking in school curricula requires teachers to introduce children to programming already at primary school level. As this is a recent development, primary school teachers may neither be adequately prepared for how to best teach programming, nor may they be fully aware why they have to do so. In order to gain a better understanding of these questions, we contrast insights taken from practical experiences with the anticipations of teachers in training. By surveying 200 teachers who have taught programming at primary schools and 97 teachers in training, we identify relevant challenges when teaching programming, opportunities that arise when children learn programming, and strategies how to address both of these in practice. While many challenges and opportunities are correctly anticipated, we find several disagreements that can inform revisions of the curricula in teaching studies to better prepare primary school teachers for teaching programming at primary schools.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenging but Full of Opportunities: Teachers’ Perspectives on Programming in Primary Schools

Greifenstein

Graßl

2021

Proceedings of the 21st Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research

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“…Throughout the manuscript we primarily use the term "coding" instead of "programming". As highlighted by Corradini et al (2018) the term "coding" may be preferred to "programming" given the many publicized initiatives that include "coding" in the title, broad media use of the term, and that, to put it simply, the term "coding" may sound more interesting or exciting than "programming". By "coding", we are referring to the process of students building skills in writing one or more lines of code to perform analysis, including computations, generating visualizations, or writing programs or functions (e.g., multiple lines of code that build to achieve some output; Van Merrienboer and Krammer, 1987).…”

Section: What Do We Mean By "Coding"?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Best Management Practices for Teaching Hydrologic Coding in Physical, Hybrid, and Virtual Classrooms

Kelleher

Gannon²,

Jones³

et al. 2022

Front. Water

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As the field of hydrologic sciences continues to advance, there is an increasing need to develop a workforce with tools to curate, manage, and analyze large datasets. As such, undergraduate and graduate curricula are beginning to regularly incorporate scientific programing in the classroom. However, there are several key challenges to successfully incorporating scientific programming into a hydrology course or curriculum, such as meeting disciplinary outcomes alongside teaching students to code, equity issues with access to computing power, and effective classroom management. While these challenges were exacerbated by the global pandemic, shifting to online and hybrid learning formats provided an opportunity to explore and re-evaluate the way we facilitated our hydrology courses and integrated coding exercises and learning. In this article, we reflect on these experiences in three very different hydrology courses (e.g., courses housed in geoscience/engineering, environmental science, and biology programs) with an eye toward identifying successes and opportunities for improvement. We explore this by presenting ten best management practices (BMPs), representing a series of recommendations we have for teaching a virtual, hybrid, or in-person hydrology course that incorporates coding. While all recommendations provided can be applied to many programming languages, the focus of the paper (given the expertise of the authors) is on R. Our BMPs focus on technological facilitation, managing the virtual classroom, and instructional resources, with lessons learned that are applicable to in-person instruction. We also summarize the ways that the authors of this article integrate coding into our coursework to serve as a framework for prepping new courses or those revising existing hydrologic coursework. Above all, we hope these series of recommendations will evolve as hydrology courses continue to emphasize computational skills alongside disciplinary learning.

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“…In spite of Papert's original idea and in spite of the line of research outlined above, most of the activities with robots proposed in classrooms currently aim at introducing "programming" or "coding" per se, and the robots end up being "little more than toys made to drive to and fro or side to side without really providing an opportunity for any scientific exploration and learning" [24]. We believe that this is in part due to the fact that these robotic toys are not designed with an explicit intention for them to become tools for mathematical learning, in which coding is not introduced per se (we note that an acritical use of the word "coding", can hide some too simplistic ideas of what computational thinking and computer science education are; to deepen this delicate issue, from the perspective of computer science education, we recommend reading [25]), but as a canvas for expressing mathematical ideas, such as algorithms, equations, as well as geometrical properties of a figure. Furthermore, in spite of the acknowledgement of the key role of the teacher, to the best of our knowledge, there seem to be many more studies related to the students' learning than to teachers' perspectives on didactical practices in mathematics enhanced by physical programmable artifacts.…”

Section: Empirical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teachers’ Perspectives on the Intertwining of Tangible and Digital Modes of Activity with a Drawing Robot for Geometry

et al. 2020

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The GeomBot is a drawing robot that combines the well-known strengths and opportunities offered by Scratch with those of Papert’s original robotic drawing-turtle. In this study we look at the GeomBot as a physical programmable artifact around which action research with a group of teachers and a researcher was carried out with the aim of designing, implementing and discussing geometry activities for primary school classes. The aim of this article is to investigate teachers’ positioning and perspectives with respect to the activities and the educational environment emerging around the Geombot in the action research. The action research meetings between September 2018 and June 2019 included nine primary school teachers from seven different Italian schools, who met regularly with the first author. After the design and experimentation sessions, in June 2019, the teachers shared their experiences during a final meeting and group discussion guided by the first author. The data collected from the teachers were analyzed using cultural categories from the Semiotic Systems of Cultural Signification, theorized by the Theory of Objectification, to identify the most significant features defining the teachers’ perspectives and identity. The seven emergent features cover teachers’ positioning with respect to: forms of rationality and language and languages: sensuous cognition and the use of ideal and material semiotic resources; accepted teaching practices, problems and situations; mathematical knowledge; the conception of the student; social interaction and forms of rationality; ethical issues; technology.

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An Investigation of Italian Primary School Teachers’ View on Coding and Programming

Cited by 9 publications

References 12 publications

Challenging but Full of Opportunities: Teachers’ Perspectives on Programming in Primary Schools

Challenging but Full of Opportunities: Teachers’ Perspectives on Programming in Primary Schools

Best Management Practices for Teaching Hydrologic Coding in Physical, Hybrid, and Virtual Classrooms

Teachers’ Perspectives on the Intertwining of Tangible and Digital Modes of Activity with a Drawing Robot for Geometry

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