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Scaffolding Young Learners' Open-Ended Programming Projects with Planning Sheets

Authors:

Donna Eatinger,

David Gonzalez-Maldonado,

Diana Franklin,

David WeintropAuthors Info & Claims

ITiCSE '22: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 1

Pages 372 - 378

https://doi.org/10.1145/3502718.3524769

Published: 07 July 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Given the increasing interest and need to teach students computer science in formal education settings, it is imperative to understand how to do so effectively and equitably. An important step of learning to program is being able to define the objective of a program and then plan out how to implement a program to produce the desired outcome. This step is particularly important in younger learners who may have little experience with programming or trying to create their own technological artifacts. In this paper, we explore how to scaffold young programmers in planning their open-ended programs as part of an intermediate Scratch curriculum for middle grade students. We analyze 203 paper and virtual planning documents from 103 5th-8th grade students. Our results reveal that the students often completed a majority of the document, which was consistent across grade levels. However, we found differences in student completion based on teacher and between physical and virtual documents. This work advances our understanding of how to support novice, young programmers in planning programs.

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Cited By

Liao YKim JOttenbreit-Leftwich AKarlin MGuo M(2024)Voices of Elementary Computer Science Teachers: Computer Science Integration Rationales and PracticesACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/368885424:4(1-26)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3688854
Reichert HTabarsi BPrice TBarnes T(2024)Jigsaw: A Tool for Decomposing and Planning Programming Problems2024 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00034(236-247)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00034

Index Terms

Scaffolding Young Learners' Open-Ended Programming Projects with Planning Sheets
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. K-12 education

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cover image ACM Conferences

ITiCSE '22: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 1

July 2022

686 pages

ISBN:9781450392013

DOI:10.1145/3502718

General Chairs:
Brett A. Becker
University College Dublin, Ireland
,
Keith Quille
Technological University Dublin, Ireland
,
Mikko-Jussi Laakso
University of Turku, Finland
,
Program Chairs:
Erik Barendsen
Radboud University & Open University, The Netherlands
,
Simon
Unaffiliated, Australia

Copyright © 2022 ACM.

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Published: 07 July 2022

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ITiCSE 2022: Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

July 8 - 13, 2022

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Cited By

Liao YKim JOttenbreit-Leftwich AKarlin MGuo M(2024)Voices of Elementary Computer Science Teachers: Computer Science Integration Rationales and PracticesACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/368885424:4(1-26)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3688854
Reichert HTabarsi BPrice TBarnes T(2024)Jigsaw: A Tool for Decomposing and Planning Programming Problems2024 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00034(236-247)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00034

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