Resources
Scratch – Scientific papers
“The analysis of the surveys shows that using an environment for learning programming such as Scratch highly motivates students and empowers them to pursue their studies in programming. When learners were asked about their desire to continue their studies in programming, 65% of students who have experienced the Scratch environment consider continuing their studies in programming whereas only 10.3% of students who used a standard programming environment showed some interest.”
– Ouahbi, I., Kaddari, F., Darhmaoui, H., Elachqar, A., Lahmine, S., 2015. Learning Basic Programming Concepts by Creating Games with Scratch Programming Environment. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 191, 1479–1482.
Using games while studying the basic programming concepts is found to boost the motivation. “The analysis of the surveys shows that using an environment for learning programming such as Scratch highly motivates students and empowers them to pursue their studies in programming. When learners were asked about their desire to continue their studies in programming, 65% of students who have experienced the Scratch environment consider continuing their studies in programming whereas only 10.3% of students who used a standard programming environment showed some interest.”
– Ouahbi, I., Kaddari, F., Darhmaoui, H., Elachqar, A., Lahmine, S., 2015. Learning Basic Programming Concepts by Creating Games with Scratch Programming Environment. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 191, 1479–1482.
“An exploratory effort to investigate the effect of Scratch programming on 5th grade primary school students’ problem solving skills. The researchers wondered what 5th grade primary school students think about programming. Programming in Scratch platform did not cause any significant differences in the problem solving skills of the primary school students. All the students liked programming and wanted to improve their programming. Finally, most of the students found the Scratch platform easy to use.”
– Kalelioğlu, F., Gülbahar, Y., 2014. The Effects of Teaching Programming via Scratch on Problem Solving Skills: A Discussion from Learners’ Perspective. Informatics in Education 13, 33–50.
“The study showed that game design activities with Scratch increased the problem-solving skills of the participants. In this context, game design activities with coding tools can be employed with children in order to help them gain problem-solving skills at an early age.”
– Erol, O., Çırak, N.S., 2021. The effect of a programming tool scratch on the problem-solving skills of middle school students. Education and Information Technologies.
“Results for questionnaires showed that students’ acceptance of the use of Scratch as a teaching aid was high, thus indicating that they agreed the use of Scratch is easy and able to facilitate their learning about programming. Students favor the use of Scratch as a teaching aid for a programming subject, particularly in a collaborative learning environment, because the utilization managed to improve their scores in tests and higher-order thinking skills.”
– Ideris, N., Baharudin, S.M., Hamzah, N., 2019. The Effectiveness of Scratch in Collaborative Learning on Higher-Order Thinking Skills in Programming Subject Among Year-Six Students, in: Proceedings of the 4th ASEAN Conference on Psychology, Counselling, and Humanities (ACPCH 2018). Atlantis Press, Paris, France.
“Analyze the effects of programming with Scratch on the views of preservice Information Technology teachers towards computer programming. There were significant increases in the mean of the preservice IT teachers’ self-efficacy perceptions regarding almost all complex programming tasks after their Scratch programming experience. The results also showed that the preservice IT teachers’ negative attitudes towards programming decreased significantly and programming in the Scratch platform had significantly positive effects on the preservice IT teachers’ attitudes regarding some items in the scale.”
– Yukselturk, E., Altiok, S., 2016. An investigation of the effects of programming with Scratch on the preservice IT teachers’ self-efficacy perceptions and attitudes towards computer programming. British Journal of Educational Technology 48, 789–801.
“The experimental results show that students who received Annotation-based Scratch Programming (ASP) tool support in conjunction with a problem-solving-based teaching approach performed significantly better than the other groups. The ASP tool was developed to enable students to create, review and share Scratch programming and homework annotations. ”
– Su, A.Y.S., Yang, S.J.H., Hwang, W.-Y., Huang, C.S.J., Tern, M.-Y., 2013. Investigating the role of computer-supported annotation in problem-solving-based teaching: An empirical study of a Scratch programming pedagogy. British Journal of Educational Technology 45, 647–665.
Python – Scientific papers
“Many researches showed that visual programming languages like Scratch and programming games instead of solving math problems have a positive effect on motivation for programming. The results of this research showed that when it comes to programming in “real” programming language, Python, 5 grade students with higher problem solving abilities achieve better results, but when it comes to programming in visual programming language, Scratch, that is not the case. When we compared students Python and Scratch results we got similar results, students accomplish better results in Scratch than in Python. These results showed that we can minimize impact on giving-up of programming due to students’ lower problem solving abilities.”
– Mladenović, M., Krpan, D., Mladenović, S., 2016. Introducing programming to elementary students novices by using game development in python and scratch, in: Edulearn Proceedings. IATED.
“The fact that “real world” programming is generally performed via textual languages, has been that educators have been increasingly forced to address the question of how one may best facilitate this transition.“
– Robinson, W., 2016. From Scratch to Patch, in: Proceedings of the 11th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
“We want to focus on teaching algorithms, developing problem-solving skills, and we want students to learn particular skills, which they will later use in their study and practice. Therefore we are not focusing on teaching a programming language, but to teach programming fundamentals. Although the Python programming language is not fulfilling all the requirements of teachers and specialists, but compared to other languages it satisfies the most of them.”
– Mészárosová, E., 2015. Is Python an Appropriate Programming Language for Teaching Programming in Secondary Schools? International Journal of Information and Communication Technologies in Education 4, 5–14.
“I have learned that teaching engineering, technology, and computer programming can be frightening if you have little to no experience, but it can be done, and is honestly easier than I first imagined. One thing to remember is that you do not have to know everything. I discovered that most students are very eager to learn independently and then share what they have learned with their peers. Allowing them to do this worked so well that I took every Friday off from teaching so they could work on independent technology projects. Writing the program for yourself prior to teaching is important for targeting potential pitfalls, identifying common errors, and areas where students will be able to be creative and add their own code. But, once the students jump in, letting them explore and try new things, and being able to respond to questions with, ‘I’m not sure, let’s try and see what happens!’”
– Fagan, B.J., Payne, B., 2017. Learning to Program in Python – by Teaching It! Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary STEM Teaching and Learning Conference 1.
“Students in the blocks condition showed greater learning gains and a higher level of interest in future computing courses. Students in the text condition viewed their programming experience as more similar to what professional programmers do and as more effective at improving their programming ability. No difference was found between students in the two conditions with respect to confidence or enjoyment.”
– Weintrop, D., Wilensky, U., 2017. Comparing Block-Based and Text-Based Programming in High School Computer Science Classrooms. ACM Transactions on Computing Education 18, 1–25.
“Board games can be useful in learning Python programming. Thus, the proposed board games can promote programming concepts and solve problems in learning programming. According to the results, the proposed board games exhibited an excellent influence on student’s learning goals.”
– Huang, L.-W., Chen, L.-W., Cheng, P.-H., 2019. Board Game Design for Python Programming Education, in: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Education (TALE). IEEE.
“The experimental group performed better than the control group, but this difference was not found to be statistically significant. CodeCombat was evaluated positively in terms of its perceived ease of use and usefulness, as well as the attitude towards its use. The results were neutral in terms of students’ behavioral intention to use CodeCombat, but were positive in using serious games for programming in general.”
– Kroustalli, C., Xinogalos, S., 2021. Studying the effects of teaching programming to lower secondary school students with a serious game: a case study with Python and CodeCombat. Education and Information Technologies 26, 6069–6095.
Scratch – Popular articles and resources
https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/8622/384.pdf?sequence=1
https://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/scratch/scratch-cacm.pdf
https://www.middleschoolcomputerprojects.org/scratch-programming.html
https://www.singaporecodingclub.com/why-scratch-is-good-for-programming/
Python – Popular articles and resources
https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~biglars/python/python-in-education.pdf
https://www.python.org/success-stories/elementary-school-education-is-it-love-or-just-python/
https://hackernoon.com/10-reasons-to-learn-python-in-2018-f473dc35e2ee
https://fossbytes.com/why-should-one-learn-python-programming-language/
https://www.goskills.com/Development/Resources/Why-is-Python-so-popular