Abstract:

This paper presents the structure of two online workshops, for learning to program and that was designed for the training of Early Childhood Educators and Primary School Teachers. One workshop is on ScratchJr (Bers & Resnick, 2016); (Bers, 2018); (Miranda-Pinto & Osório, 2020) and the other on Scratch (Group, Lab, & Company, 2014); (Maloney, Resnick, Rusk, Silverman, & Eastmond, 2010) and both were developed within a curricular unit of the Early Childhood Technology Certificate Program at Tuft University, during the academic year 2020/2021, implemented in July 2021 and tested by a group of 25 students. The intention of this assignment was that the students in the course "Special Topics: Early Childhood Technology Residency", could attend one of the Online Workshops, that I developed, to learn how to program in ScratchJr or Scratch. Both Workshops were designed for training Early Childhood Educators and Primary School Teachers, to be done independently, during 5 days, for a total of 10 hours. I prepared a plan with a set of activities and resources for an online training with total autonomy. The possibility of implementing this ScratchJr and Scratch online training prototype with my course colleagues allowed me to share ideas, doubts and improve the initially proposed training plan. Considering this research, a Case Study methodological approach (Yin, 2014), the workshops were implemented and tested in a July 2021 Week. However, due to the numerous activities in this week of our course, it was suggested by the lecturer in charge that I give other options to my colleagues, to explore the workshops. Thus, I put two more options, to facilitate the exploration of the workshops or just to get feedback on the structure of the workshops. For data collection a questionnaire survey was conducted, previously validated by the course lecturer, who authorized its availability. I also resorted to the analyses shared in the discussion forums, with the reflections of colleagues presenting relevant results for the reformulation of these workshops and serving to consolidate the data we consider relevant for this restructuring of the workshops. At the end, it was possible to highlight the contributions of these two online workshops to the training of Early Childhood Educators and Primary School Teachers, who, in a training environment, with total autonomy, were able to perform and conclude ScratchJr and Scratch with significant learnings. These learnings aim at a future integration of ScratchJr and Scratch in the curricula, by these education professionals, in their educational contexts.

References:
[1] Bers, M. U. (2018). Coding as a playground: programming and computational thinking in the early childhood classroom. New York: Routledge.
[2] Bers, M. U., & Resnick, M. (2016). ScratchJr. (I. No Starch Press, Ed.). San Francisco, CA: William Polloch.
[3] Group, D. R., Lab, L. K. G. at the M. I. T. M., & Company, P. I. (2014). Scratch . Obtido de http://www.scratchjr.org/
[4] Maloney, J., Resnick, M., Rusk, N., Silverman, B., & Eastmond, E. (2010). The Scratch Programming Language and Environment. ACM Trans. Comput. Educ, 10(4), 15. https://doi.org/10.1145/1868358.1868363
[5] Miranda-Pinto, M., & Osório, A. J. (2020). Scratchjr App in Portuguese Schools: Kids Media Lab Project. Em ICERI2020 Proceedings (Vol. 1, pp. 5709–5718). https://doi.org/10.21125/iceri.2020.1227
[6] Yin, R. K. (2014). Case study research: design and methods. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.

Keywords:

ScratchJr, Scratch, Online Training, Early Childhood Education, Primary Education.