Applying Scratch Programming to Facilitate Teaching in k-12 Classrooms

Afrin Naz; Mingyu Lu; Cody Ryan Zackoski; Caleb R Dingus

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Conference: 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Columbus, Ohio
Publication Date: June 24, 2017
Start Date: June 24, 2017
End Date: June 28, 2017
Conference Session: CoED: Computer Science Topics
Tagged Division: Computers in Education
Page Count: 9
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--27604
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/27604
Download Count: 2730

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Paper Authors

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Afrin Naz West Virginia University Institute of Technology

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Dr. Afrin Naz is an assistant professor at the Computer Science and Information Systems department at West Virginia University Institute of Technology. She is working with high school teachers to inspire the K-12 students to the STEM fields. In last four years Dr. Naz and her team launched six workshops for high school teachers. Currently her team is training the high school teachers to offer online materials to supplement their face-to-face classroom.

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Mingyu Lu West Virginia University Institute of Technology

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Mingyu Lu received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1995 and 1997 respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. From 1997 to 2002, he was a research assistant at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 2002 to 2005, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Electromagnetics Laboratory in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was an assistant professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, the University of Texas at Arlington from 2005 to 2012. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, West Virginia University Institute of Technology in 2012, and he is currently an associate professor. His current research interests include wireless power transmission, radar systems, microwave remote sensing, antenna design, and computational electromagnetics. He was the recipient of the first prize award in the student paper competition of the IEEE International Antennas and Propagation Symposium, Boston, MA in 2001. He served as the chair of Antennas and Propagation Society of IEEE Fort Worth Chapter from 2006 to 2011.

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Cody Ryan Zackoski West Virginia University Institute of Technology

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Currently, I am a second-year student enrolled at WVU Institute of Technology, studying for a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Information Systems. Before coming to WVU Institute of Techonology, I graduated suma cum laude from both Midland Trail High School and from Fayette Institute of Technology in the Aries Computer Maintenance course. I taught a 12-week night class at Fayette Institute of technology on smartphones and tablets on three separate occasions. After coming to WVU Institute of Technology, I began working under Dr. Afrin Naz in a work-study arrangement. In this work-study, I am continuing research with parallel computing, and using the Scratch programming language as a tool for STEM education in the K-12 fields.

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Caleb R Dingus West Virginia University Institute of Technology

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I am a student at West Virginia University Institute of Technology working towards a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. I worked with Middle and High School teachers in developing curriculum and implementing Computer Science concepts.

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Abstract

Scratch is a free educational programming language created by Lifelong Kindergarten group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, geared towards kids ages to 8-16 and grades 3rd grade to high school. It is also an online community of over 12 million registered users where children can program creatively and collaboratively. Many institutions have created and deployed Scratch based outreach programs across the nation to teach k12 students programming, such as Wichita State University, New Mexico State University, University of Texas in Dallas, and University of California to name a few examples. Since Scratch sticks with a graphical programming interface absent of lines of code, Kindergarten and up can benefit from its simplicity. Scratch is often referred to as a programming language. From our experience, Scratch is not as much a programming language as it is a tool—a tool that teachers can adapt to nearly any subject. If used effectively, Scratch can teach children logic while simultaneously being used as a supplement in teaching all their core curricula. In this yearlong project we are working closely with a group of middle and high school teachers from three counties of West Virginia to utilize Scratch programming to model concepts learned in any subject area in the K-12 classrooms. Our focus is to employ Scratch to model projects closely related to real-world applications to facilitate delivering abstract concepts in the K-12 curricula. We are working with middle and high school teachers in different subject areas including English, Physical Science, Math, Biology, Music and more. This project consists of three phases. In Phase 1 we visited the classrooms to establish trusting relationships with the participating teachers in order to facilitate the next two phases. Phase 2 is an online workshop in which systematic training on Scratch programming is delivered systematically. Phase 3 is year-round online and on-site support for one year after the summer workshop to maintain a long-term community of practice among k12 teachers and university educators. During this phase 3 our computer science university students are working with the participating teachers to develop their scratch projects applicable to their own subject areas. This “hybrid format” (face-to-face + online), is tailored for the needs of these teachers who have no prior programming experience. The impact of the project on teachers and students is determined through a series of surveys and interviews. We are also collecting pre and post raw scores from student assessments before and after administering a scratch project. At present, we are still in the process of collecting results from students and have not collected the final survey data from the participating teachers. While the data are still being collected, the initial survey results indicate that, the project succeeded in instructing the basic concepts of Scratch programming to the participating teachers and increasing their confidence of incorporating scratch-based learning into their own subject areas. Results of the all surveys, interviews, and student performance will be presented at the paper.

Citation
Format

Naz, A., & Lu, M., & Zackoski, C. R., & Dingus, C. R. (2017, June), Applying Scratch Programming to Facilitate Teaching in k-12 Classrooms Paper presented at 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio. 10.18260/1-2--27604

TY - CPAPER
AB - Scratch is a free educational programming language created by Lifelong Kindergarten group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, geared towards kids ages to 8-16 and grades 3rd grade to high school. It is also an online community of over 12 million registered users where children can program creatively and collaboratively. Many institutions have created and deployed Scratch based outreach programs across the nation to teach k12 students programming, such as Wichita State University, New Mexico State University, University of Texas in Dallas, and University of California to name a few examples. Since Scratch sticks with a graphical programming interface absent of lines of code, Kindergarten and up can benefit from its simplicity. Scratch is often referred to as a programming language. From our experience, Scratch is not as much a programming language as it is a tool—a tool that teachers can adapt to nearly any subject. If used effectively, Scratch can teach children logic while simultaneously being used as a supplement in teaching all their core curricula.
In this yearlong project we are working closely with a group of middle and high school teachers from three counties of West Virginia to utilize Scratch programming to model concepts learned in any subject area in the K-12 classrooms. Our focus is to employ Scratch to model projects closely related to real-world applications to facilitate delivering abstract concepts in the K-12 curricula. We are working with middle and high school teachers in different subject areas including English, Physical Science, Math, Biology, Music and more.
This project consists of three phases. In Phase 1 we visited the classrooms to establish trusting relationships with the participating teachers in order to facilitate the next two phases. Phase 2 is an online workshop in which systematic training on Scratch programming is delivered systematically. Phase 3 is year-round online and on-site support for one year after the summer workshop to maintain a long-term community of practice among k12 teachers and university educators. During this phase 3 our computer science university students are working with the participating teachers to develop their scratch projects applicable to their own subject areas. This “hybrid format” (face-to-face + online), is tailored for the needs of these teachers who have no prior programming experience.
The impact of the project on teachers and students is determined through a series of surveys and interviews. We are also collecting pre and post raw scores from student assessments before and after administering a scratch project. At present, we are still in the process of collecting results from students and have not collected the final survey data from the participating teachers. While the data are still being collected, the initial survey results indicate that, the project succeeded in instructing the basic concepts of Scratch programming to the participating teachers and increasing their confidence of incorporating scratch-based learning into their own subject areas. Results of the all surveys, interviews, and student performance will be presented at the paper.

AU - Afrin Naz
AU - Mingyu Lu
AU - Cody Ryan Zackoski
AU - Caleb R Dingus
CY - Columbus, Ohio
DA - 2017/06/24
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Applying Scratch Programming to Facilitate Teaching in k-12 Classrooms
UR - https://peer.asee.org/27604
DO - 10.18260/1-2--27604
ER -