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Learner Ideas and Interests Expressed in Open-ended Projects in a Middle School Computer Science Curriculum

Authors:

David Weintrop,

Donna Eatinger,

Diana FranklinAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1

Pages 820 - 826

https://doi.org/10.1145/3545945.3569807

Published: 03 March 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Ensuring that computer science curricula connect to learners' home culture, interests, and lived experiences is one approach to making the field more equitable. A central feature of the Scratch Encore Curriculum is to provide many opportunities for learners to plan and implement open-ended programming projects that invite them to draw on their prior knowledge, experiences, and cultural resources. To date, relatively little research has been done to analyze how learners respond to such curricular invitations, specifically with respect to what aspects of themselves and their interests they choose to express in their resulting projects.

In this work, we investigate what people, places, interests, and experiences learners draw from as they plan and program open-ended Scratch projects. We analyzed the planning documents and final projects of 101 4th-7th grade (9-13 years) learners from the first two modules of our curriculum. The results show that when given the chance, learners incorporate aspects (such as Home and Family, and Hobbies and Leisure) of themselves into open-ended projects. Some learners drew from many areas of their lives while others focused on specific events, people, or interests. Our findings also indicate that the activities and Scratch are conducive to having learners of this age group express themselves, even early in the curriculum when they are still learning basic Scratch and CS concepts. This work contributes to our understanding of the impact of culturally responsive curricula and how it shapes the way learners engage with and express themselves in computing curricula.

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Cited By

Nelson-Fromm T(2023)Open-Ended Assignments for Teaching Contextualized ComputingProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 210.1145/3568812.3603445(76-78)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3568812.3603445

Index Terms

Learner Ideas and Interests Expressed in Open-ended Projects in a Middle School Computer Science Curriculum
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. K-12 education

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1

March 2023

1481 pages

ISBN:9781450394314

DOI:10.1145/3545945

General Chairs:
Maureen Doyle
Northern Kentucky University, USA
,
Ben Stephenson
University of Calgary, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Brian Dorn
University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA
,
Leen-Kiat Soh
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
,
Lina Battestilli
North Carolina State University, USA

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 03 March 2023

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SIGCSE 2023: The 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

March 15 - 18, 2023

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Cited By

Nelson-Fromm T(2023)Open-Ended Assignments for Teaching Contextualized ComputingProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 210.1145/3568812.3603445(76-78)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3568812.3603445

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