LEARNING PROGRAMMING BY PLAYING AND CODING GAMES IN K-9

For some years now many Swedish teachers in K-9 education have explored programming with their pupils supported by a number of national and global initiatives, despite not having any formal education in programming or for teaching programming. However, with the advent of programming languages such as Scratch and various online resources tailored to younger learners, teachers have some extent been supported to teach programming. In this study, we reached out to 19 teachers that by now considered themselves experienced in teaching programming for young children in K-9 and conducted interviews with them. A large majority of these teachers, fifteen of them, participated in a national research project with focus on programming education. The remaining four teachers were identified in specialized social media groups with focus on programming education. When doing the interviews with the teachers we soon found that games play a big role when teaching and learning programming in K-9 education. This entails both playing games in order to learn programming concepts using game developed for this purpose, and coding games in order to learn programming concepts. In this paper, we report on this two approaches of relating to games in programming education in K-9 and present the advantages teachers emphasize with these approaches in terms of how they are received by pupils and what the bring to school.