Defining Procedures in Early Computing Education

Abstract

From the early years of educational programming researchers considered procedural abstraction a key instrument of computational thinking and tried to understand the cognitive difficulties encountered through this concept. Defining procedures is promoted in renewed computing curricula in several countries. And yet, it is rarely acknowledged by more recent educational research. In this paper, we consider the fact that the delayed implementation of a mechanism for building procedures (known as definitions) within Scratch, a widely used programming environment for children, may have negatively impacted the focus within curricular content on this powerful idea. In our research, which is a part of a broader ScratchMaths (SM) research project, we set out to explore which factors play a role in upper primary pupils understanding and utilizing the concept of defining procedures as a common and inherent instrument of their programming. We present our observations from the project design schools and demonstrate how they guided the development of our SM pedagogic strategy for definitions.

Designing a Programming Game to Improve Children’s Procedural Abstraction Skills in Scratch

“…In conclusion, we have addressed RQ1 in showing that Pirate Plunder can be used to teach primary school children (age 10 and 11) to use procedural abstraction in Scratch projects. This is a significant finding and indicates that procedural abstraction can be part of computer science curricula for this age group, supporting the results of Kalas and Benton (2017).…”

“…Scratch supports constructionism by always having the block-palette visible, having little in-built guidance and feedback and no error messages. This type of block-based programming is also prevalent in other popular tools used in primary education including Code.org (Code.org, 2020), Tynker (Neuron Fuel, 2020), Hopscotch (Hopscotch Technologies, 2020) and Purple Mash (2Simple Ltd, 2020).…”

“…Although similar, our work differs from this in that we aim to teach children to do this process themselves and to understand why this is beneficial. Kalas and Benton (2017) explored the factors that underpin primary school children’s understanding of procedural abstraction and suggest a pedagogical approach that they found effective. Pirate Plunder aims to do this without teacher instruction, which leads us to our first research question (RQ1): can a game-based learning approach be used to teach primary school children to use procedural abstraction in Scratch projects?…”

Exploring perceived cognitive load in learning programming via Scratch

“…In a wide range of Scratch projects, it is seen that the frequently used programming concepts are sequences, loops, parallelism, events, conditionals, operators and data (Brennan and Resnick 2012). In line with this, most of the studies about learning programming focus on the basic concepts of programming such as variables, loops, conditions and controls, message passing or concurrency (Kalas and Benton 2017;Meerbaum-Salant, Armoni, and Ben-Ari 2013). In parallel with prior studies and the objectives of the course, we focused on four main concepts of introductory programming.…”