Influence of the Familiarization with “Scratch” on Future Teachers’ Opinions and Attitudes about Programming and ICT in Education

Computer programming is considered a very important competence which is usually quite difficult to learn. Teaching computer programming to novices has to overcome important obstacles in order to be successful. The problem is even greater for non-computer science majors. In order to overcome the difficulties and increase the rate of students that adopt positive views towards computer science, several educational programming environments have been proposed. Scratch educational programming environment offers innovative programming techniques and enables the rather easy development of games, animations, interactive stories, etc. But do you know how the future teachers’ attitudes and opinions towards the effects of using Scratch in an introductory computer programming course? Let's explored it with me!

Computer programming can be exploited for the development of higher-order skills like problem-solving, creative thinking, logical reasoning, systematic experimentation, etc. In addition, recently computer programming has been referred to as literacy for modern society because it enables citizens to become active producers of interactive digital content for web 2.0.

Despite its importance, computer programming competence is considered to be difficult to develop. Students often face difficulties in the comprehension of central concepts and in composing programs that fulfill certain specifications. It is characteristic that the rates of students that fail or drop out in introductory computer programming courses are estimated to (15- 30) %.

ABOUT THE SCRATCH ENVIRONMENT 

Scratch provides graphic programming language making computer programming accessible to children (from 8 years old), adolescents and other novice programmers. Basic control structures (sequential, selection, repetition) are composed by dragging and stacking corresponding graphic building blocks, eliminating the usual syntactical errors. In addition to the basic control structures, the language offers event triggers (when- clicked, when-key-pressed) for event-driven programming and named broadcasts for multithreading. Using Scratch novice programmers have also opportunities to get familiarized with concepts such as variables, lists-arrays, Boolean logic, user interface design, etc. Scratch offers the possibility of constructing media-rich projects that incorporate graphics, animation, music, and sound. It also gives the opportunity to create video games, animation, interactive stories, etc. Scratch has been used in formal education with structured learning activities (in subjects such as the introduction to computer science or advanced issues in software engineering) as well as in informal learning environments (such as computer clubs etc). 

ATTITUDES AND OPINIONS OF FUTURE TEACHERS ABOUT ICT 

The term “attitude” means the general assessment or feeling of favorable or unfavorable disposal of a person against ICT or specific activities using ICT.

The study of teacher attitudes towards ICT internationally shows that they relate to several factors like 1. Anxiety & stress, 2. Self-efficacy, 3. Desire and pleasure, 4. Perceptions about ICT value and usefulness etc. Studies also claim that there are differences in attitudes dependent on parameters such as sex, education stage, teachers’ training, etc. Effective teachers’ training is considered among the most important factors for the formulation of a positive attitude towards ICT. In the special case of future teachers, research claims that women students have higher anxiety and stress levels than men and that participation in relevant courses helps them lower down the stress levels.

DISCUSSION AFTER THE RESEARCH

The research has been implemented with students and teachers to know their opinions about Scratch. They used questionnaires including Assessment of specific features of Scratch, Attitudes against ICT in general, etc.

For the improvement of the situation, several approaches have been proposed including the development of educational programming environments. These languages aim to make computer programming more attractive and accessible to children, novice programmers, and students of nontechnological disciplines (non-majors). In this direction, the Scratch system has been selected for use in a course concerning the development of multimedia educational applications offered to students of the “preschool education and educational design department” at the University of the Aegean.

Within the framework of this course, research regarding the investigation of the effects of Scratch familiarization on students’ opinions and attitudes towards ICT in education and computer programming has been conducted. Students that participated in the research had basic ICT skills while very few were familiar with computer programming or multimedia processing. Despite this fact, students consider Scratch user-friendly and they are satisfied with its features.

As far as the students’ attitudes against ICT in education are concerned, familiarization with Scratch seems: to increase the already high percentage of students that declare interest to exploit ICT in education; and to decrease significantly (statistically) the percentage of students with stress and anxiety about their ability to utilize ICT in educational practice. The importance of this result is even more significant if we consider that all of the sample students are females which according to research reports have greater percentage of stress and anxiety about ICT. As far as the internet and application development is concerned there is an increased percentage of students that wish to design internet-based learning activities and to program educational applications after the use of Scratch.

Combining the research data, it is possible to claim that Scratch has a rather positive effect on students’ opinions and attitudes towards computer programming and ICT educational value increasing the possibilities of successful introduction in computer science and the adoption of effective practices in the educational practice. The research results validate the educational decision of using Scratch in a course of computer programming for future teachers.

In future, this work could be continued: in order to compare Scratch with other similar educational programming environments in terms of influence of students attitudes; to more detailed exploration of the special characteristics of Scratch that make the difference to other environments; to see if the knowledge on programming developed by students can be generalized and transferred to other programming environments; to investigate the effects to other populations such as the in-service teachers, etc.

REFERENCES 

1. Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1980). “Understanding attitudes and predicting social behavior”. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 
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3. Fesakis G., & Dimitrakopoulou A., (2006), Review of educational environments for programming: Technological and Pedagogical Dimensions, in journal THEMES in education , 7(3), pp. 279-304 in Greek 
4. Fesakis G., Dimitrakopoulou A., Serafeim, K., Zafeiropoulou, A., Ntouni, M. & Touka, V. (2008). Introduction the Scratch educational environment. In proceeding of the 3rd Pan-Hellenic Conference on “Informatics Didactics ” (Patras, Greece, March,26-28, 2008), Available online in Greek at: http://www.etpe.gr
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