Introducing teachers to engineering practices with ScratchJr: Programming patterns and documentation guidelines

Abstract

One of the main problems for the widespread introduction of informatics into the school curriculum is the lack of trained teachers. Teacher development in informatics must include different programming concepts and skills. Their mastery of programming should not be shallow, but this concern must be handled carefully, as they usually are not highly motivated to learn programming. We introduce two engineering practices that contribute to deeper learning of programming and are both useful and easy to use by teachers and their instructors. They are introduced in the context of the ScratchJr block-based programming language. Firstly, we present a collection of ten programming patterns. They correspond to either of three categories: visual effects, movement patterns, and control movements. Secondly, we present guidelines to document ScratchJr programs. The guidelines were inspired in the Block Model of program comprehension but were adapted to the structure of ScratchJr programs. We conducted an evaluation of teachers’ acceptance of patterns and application of documentation guidelines. The results were highly positive. They also allowed us to identify lines for near future work, mainly regarding documentation guidelines.