Abstract:

The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of an online course on the ScratchJr programming language, which promotes the development of computational thinking and coding. This course is available for free in the @rcaComum community (hosted on the Moodle platform - https://comunidade.arcacomum.pt) and is based on a training proposal that has been financially supported by the Arcacomum Association in Portugal (https://www.arcacomum.pt), the Scratch Collaborative Education community of the MIT Media Lab, led by M. Resnick and the DevTech Research Group at Boston College, led by Marina Bers, between 2022-2024. For this purpose, a formative evaluation of the online course for learning ScratchJr was carried out with Pedagogy students at the University of Malaga. Initially, a questionnaire on general knowledge about Programming Languages in Education was applied. Then, the students took the ScratchJr online course aimed at education professionals (in initial or continuous training) where learning is done autonomously for five days and with a total of ten hours. At the end, a final questionnaire was applied to compare changes in the level of knowledge of those students who completed the training. The findings of the initial questionnaire showed that the students had no knowledge of Programming Languages (77.1%), ScratchJr (79.2%) and Computational Thinking (87.5%). They were also unaware of other Programming Languages for children (95.8%) and did not know how to code with any Programming Language (97.9%). After the completion of the course and the evaluation of the final project, the students acquired basic knowledge and skills on Programming Languages, Computational Thinking and Coding, while learning to program with ScratchJr. In addition, the results of the final questionnaire revealed an impact of the training, since between 96.4% and 100% of the students valued the importance of including Computational Thinking and Programming with ScratchJr in the initial training of the pedagogue for their future professional practice in different areas of Pedagogy. Thus, it is concluded that the autonomous and self-manageable realization of the ScratchJr course has an important impact on the training of students, contributing to significant learning about Computational Thinking and Programming through ScratchJr. The ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation) Instructional Design model followed in the creation of this online course is also valued, since the evaluation phase is fundamental to determine its continuation and effective implementation.

Keywords:

ScratchJr, Programming Languages, Online Training, Pedagogy, ADDIE model.