Leading team:
- Prof. Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari
- Prof. Michal Armoni
Project team:
- Dr. Orni Meerbaum-Salant
- Dr. Fatima Kaloti-Hallak
Brief
At the center of this project stands a textbook for teaching computer science ideas and concepts to middle school students using the Scratch environment. We studied the effect of using this textbook for teaching computer science in middle school from different angles: We showed that middle-school students can learn ideas and concepts of computer science; we studied the effects of learning computer science in middle school on the students’ learning of computer science in high school; and we described programming habits in Scratch that emerged from the students’ outcomes.
Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab.
Further reading:
- Armoni, M., & Ben-Ari, M. (2010). Computer Science Concepts in Scratch. Rehovot, Israel: Weizmann Institute of Science.
- Meerbaum-Salant, O., Armoni, M., & Ben-Ari, M. (2010). Learning computer science concepts with Scratch. In M. E. Caspersen, M. Clancy, & K. Sanders (Eds.), Proceedings of the sixth International Workshop on Computing Education Research (ICER10, Aaarhus, Denmark) (pp. 69-76)
- Meerbaum-Salant, O., Armoni, M., & Ben-Ari, M. (2011). Habits of programming in Scratch. In G. Rößling, T. Naps, & C. Spannagel (Eds), Proceedings of the 16th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, (ITiCSE11, Darmstadt, Germany) (pp. 168-172).
- Gordon, M., Marron, A., & Meerbaum-Salant O. (2012). Spaghetti for the main course?: observations on the naturalness of scenario-based programming. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE'12), Haifa, Israel, 198-203.
- Meerbaum-Salant, O., Armoni, M., & Ben-Ari, M. (2013). Learning Computer Science Concepts with Scratch. Computer Science Education, 23(3), 239-264.
- Armoni, M., Meerbaum-Salant, O., & Ben-Ari, M. (2015). From Scratch to “Real” Programming. ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 14(4), 25:1-15.