Abstract:

The objective of this study is to evaluate the structure, contents, and activities 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 has been based on a training proposal funded 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, the evaluation of the online course design for learning ScratchJr was carried out with 28 Pedagogy students from the University of Malaga, who completed the course. The students completed the ScratchJr online course aimed at education professionals (in initial or continuous training) whose learning is done autonomously for five days and a total of ten hours. At the end of the course, a questionnaire was applied to evaluate the suitability and quality of the course structure, contents, and activities. The findings showed that 100% of the students considered that the documents (PDF) with information about the structure, information, and planning of the ScratchJr course are well structured and contain clear information about the organization, the necessary resources, and the activities to be carried out during the 10 hours. Regarding the content, 100% of the students indicated that the readings provided were sufficient and adequate to understand the ScratchJr application. On the other hand, 92.9% indicated that the Coding Cards activities were sufficient and adequate for learning the basics of the ScratchJr application, as well as 96.4% of the students considered that the Project Design activity (Storyboard) for ScratchJr, as a pre-final task, was adequate and relevant for the subsequent completion of the Final Project in the application. Thus, the ScratchJr course was rated by the students with a 4.60 out of 5. In conclusion, the students' perception highlights the quality of the design, while at the same time allows enhancing the positive aspects and improving those that require it. The ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation) Instructional Design model followed in the creation of this online course is highlighted, since the evaluation phase is fundamental to achieve optimal levels of quality and suitability.

Keywords:

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