Jesús Moreno-León

Dr. Scratch: a Web Tool to Automatically Evaluate Scratch Projects

This poster paper presents the operation and the new features of Dr. Scratch, an award-winning gamified web application that allows to perform automatic analysis of Scratch projects to assess the development of computational thinking and detect some bad programming habits that are common in students learning to program in this environment.

Comparing computational thinking development assessment scores with software complexity metrics

The development of computational thinking skills through computer programming is a major topic in education, as governments around the world are introducing these skills in the school curriculum. In consequence, educators and students are facing this discipline for the first time. Although there are many technologies that assist teachers and learners in the learning of this competence, there is a lack of tools that support them in the assessment tasks. This paper compares the computational thinking score provided by Dr. Scratch, a free/libre/open source software assessment tool for Scratch, with McCabes Cyclomatic Complexity and Halsteads metrics, two classic software engineering metrics that are globally recognized as a valid measurement for the complexity of a software system. The findings, which prove positive, significant, moderate to strong correlations between them, could be therefore considered as a validation of the complexity assessment process of Dr. Scratch.

Developing Mathematical Thinking with Scratch

One of the latest trends in the educational landscape is the introduction of computer programming in the K-12 classroom to develop computational thinking in students. As computational thinking is not a skill exclusively related to computer science, it is assumed - but not yet scientifically proven - that the problem solving process may be general- ized and transferred to a wide variety of problems. This paper presents a research designed to test whether the use of coding in Maths classes could have a positive impact on learning outcomes of students in their mathematical skills. Therefore, the questions we want to investigate in this paper are if the use of programming in Maths classes improves (a) modeling process and reality phenomena, (b) reasoning, (c) prob- lem formulation and problem solving, and (d) comparison and execution of procedures and algorithms. We have therefore designed a quantita- tive, quasi-experimental experiment with 42 participating 6th grade (11 and 12 years old) students. Results show that there is a statistically sig- nificant increase in the understanding of mathematical processes in the experimental group, which received training in Scratch.

Software clones in scratch projects: on the presence of copy-and-paste in computational thinking learning

Computer programming is being introduced in schools worldwide as part of a movement that promotes Computational Thinking (CT) skills among young learners. In general, learners use visual, block-based programming languages to acquire these skills, with Scratch being one of the most popular ones. Similar to professional developers, learners also copy and paste their code, resulting in duplication. In this paper we present the findings of correlating the assessment of the CT skills of learners with the presence of software clones in over 230,000 projects obtained from the Scratch platform. Specifically, we investigate i) if software cloning is an extended practice in Scratch projects, ii) if the presence of code cloning is independent of the programming mastery of learners, iii) if code cloning can be found more frequently in Scratch projects that require specific skills (as parallelism or logical thinking), and iv) if learners who have the skills to avoid software cloning really do so. The results show that i) software cloning can be commonly found in Scratch projects, that ii) it becomes more frequent as learners work on projects that require advanced skills, that iii) no CT dimension is to be found more related to the absence of software clones than others, and iv) that learners -even if they potentially know how to avoid cloning- still copy and paste frequently. The insights from this paper could be used by educators and learners to determine when it is pedagogically more effective to address software cloning, by educational programming platform developers to adapt their systems, and by learning assessment tools to provide better evaluations.

Code to learn with Scratch? A systematic literature review

The use of computer programming in K-12 spread into schools worldwide in the 70s and 80s of the last century, but it disappeared from the educational landscape in the early 90s. With the development of visual programming languages such as Scratch, this movement has emerged again in recent years, as teachers at all educational levels and from different disciplines consider that the use of programming enhances learning in many subjects and allows students to develop important skills. The systematic literature review presented in this article aims to summarize the results of recent research using programming with Scratch in subjects not related to computing and communications, as well as studies analyzing the kind of skills students develop while learning to code in this environment. Although the analyzed papers provide promising results regarding the use of programming as an educational resource, this review highlights the need to conduct more empirical research in classrooms, using larger samples of students that allow to obtain clear conclusions about the types of learning that could be enhanced through programming.

Code to Learn: Where Does It Belong in the K-12 Curriculum?.

The introduction of computer programming in K-12 has become mainstream in the last years, as countries around the world are making coding part of their curriculum. Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical studies that investigate how learning to program at an early age affects other school subjects. In this regard, this paper compares three quasi-experimental research designs conducted in three different schools (n=129 students from 2 and 6 grade), in order to assess the impact of introducing programming with Scratch at different stages and in several subjects. While both 6 grade experimental groups working with coding activities showed a statistically significant improvement in terms of academic performance, this was not the case in the 2 grade classroom. Notable disparity was also found regarding the subject in which the programming activities were included, as in social studies the effect size was double that in mathematics.

On the Automatic Assessment of Computational Thinking Skills: A Comparison with Human Experts

Programming and computational thinking skills are promoted in schools worldwide. However, there is still a lack of tools that assist learners and educators in the assessment of these skills. We have implemented an assessment tool, called Dr. Scratch, that analyzes Scratch projects with the aim to assess the level of development of several aspects of computational thinking. One of the issues to address in order to show its validity is to compare the (automatic) evaluations provided by the tool with the (manual) evaluations by (human) experts. In this paper we compare the assessments provided by Dr. Scratch with over 450 evaluations of Scratch projects given by 16 experts in computer science education. Our results show strong correlations between automatic and manual evaluations. As there is an ample debate among educators on the use of this type of tools, we discuss the implications and limitations, and provide recommendations for further research.

Assessing Computational Thinking in Students' Game Designs

Designing games requires a complex sequence of planning and executing actions. This paper suggests that game design requires computational thinking, and discusses two methods for analyzing computational thinking in games designed by students in the visual programming language Scratch. We present how these two analyses produce different narratives of computational thinking for our case studies, and reflect on how we plan to move forward with our larger analysis.

Computer programming as an educational tool in the English classroom a preliminary study

Computational thinking, a problem solving method that uses computer science techniques, has recently become mainstream as many governments and major Internet companies are promoting programming skills among children. However, little is known about how programming affects other aspects of life beyond the acquired programming skills. In this regard, this paper summarizes the work done in the school San Diego and San Vicente (Madrid, Spain) during the third quarter of the year 2013/2014, where we conducted a study with four groups of students in 4th and 5th grade to measure to what extent the use of computer programming in English classes can be an interesting educational tool with a positive impact on the learning otucome of the students. The results show that the groups working with programming activities improved more than the groups using traditional resources. Moreover, when asked via surveys at the end of the study, most students felt that coding was a positive influence, not only for learning English, but for developing other important skills as teamwork and learning to learn.

The Europe Code Week (CodeEU) initiative shaping the skills of future engineers

The growth of employment opportunities in the information technology sector and the shortage of well-trained professionals in this field are a recurring theme in recent years in both Europe and North America. In this sense, research studies that analyse the causes of the reduction of students who are interested in computer science mainly point to young people being unaware of the type of tasks computer scientists perform. Therefore, in order to try to reverse this trend many types of initiatives have been organized seeking to bring the world of computing to children and adolescents.