Are Educators Ready for Coding?

From Students Back to Teacher: Introducing the Class to Coding the Other Way

Round

Stefano Federici

, Elisabetta Gola

, Denise Brau

and Andrea Zuncheddu

Department of Education, Psycology and Philosophy, University of Cagliari, via Is Mirrionis 1, Cagliari, Italy

Faculty of Human Studies, University of Cagliari, via Is Mirrionis 1, Cagliari, Italy

Keywords: Computing, Coding, Education, Scratch, BloP.

Abstract: During the last year, several countries, such as England, Finland and Italy, have decided to focus their new

school curricula on computing, coding and IT. However, present teachers do not feel confident about moving

to this new paradigm. Furthermore, coding would be relegated to be taught for just a few hours. Luckily,

recent new tools have been designed to introduce young students to coding that can be also easily used by

teachers to create engaging multimedia supports for their everyday lessons. In this paper, we describe several

experiments that show how a new path from teachers to students and then back to teachers can be followed

in order to build a new model of digital teaching. The proposed model does not require present teachers to

become proficient IT experts.

1 INTRODUCTION

Coding and IT as fundamental skills for today

students has had a great surge of attention during last

year. In the United Kingdom, in September 2014, a

new curriculum (UK Dept. of Education, 2013) has

started in all maintained UK schools that puts, for the

very first time, a strong emphasis on computing. In

Italy, in September 2014, the Italian Government

launched the “La Buona Scuola” (The Good School)

collaborative initiative. The government asked Italian

and foreign people to comment and suggest on the

draft proposal for enhancing the Italian school system

(Italian Dept. of Education, University and Research,

2014). In the proposal, they introduced more Arts,

Economics, Foreign Languages and, at least, one hour

of coding per week for all schools of all grades. In

Finland, in November 2014, the National Board of

Education has decided to reduce the time dedicated to

handwriting in order to increase the time dedicated to

typing (Finnish National Board of Education, 2014).

In the United States, in December 2014, government

acknowledged Code.org’s efforts to reach students

with the Hour of Code and President Obama became

one of the almost 100 million people to try coding this

past year.

If teaching how to use type on a keyboard is

something that can be possibly taught by almost all

teachers in the first grades, teaching how to code is

something different, involving knowledge that only a

few of the UK and Italian teachers have in their

portfolio.

Coding is the ability to analyse specific problems

and to write computer programs to solve them by

means of abstraction, logic, algorithms and data

representation (Italian Dept. of Education, University

and Research, 2014). Computing is the ability to

evaluate and apply information technology, including

new or unfamiliar technologies, to be a “competent,

confident and creative users of information and

communication technology” (UK Dept. of Education,

2013).

Not surprisingly, more than half of UK teachers

feels not confident in their ability to teach computing

skills, and only 7% feels very confident (TES and

Nesta, 2014). The purpose of the Italian Dept. of

Education is similarly ambitious, aiming to introduce

internet connection and interactive whiteboards in all

Italian classrooms and coding as a subject starting at

the primary school.

But how can only a few hours of coding during

the year prepare students so that they can benefit from

the rigorous methods of computer science?

In our view, coding should not be a separate

subject by itself but it should become an

interdisciplinary instrument used by teachers of all

494

Federici S., Gola E., Brau D. and Zuncheddu A..

Are Educators Ready for Coding? - From Students Back to Teacher: Introducing the Class to Coding the Other Way Round.

DOI: 10.5220/0005491604940500

In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2015), pages 494-500

ISBN: 978-989-758-107-6

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

subjects. Teachers from all subjects should be trained

(or they should self-train) to teaching coding.

2 WHY IS CODING DIFFICULT

TO TEACHERS

Preparing teachers for coding is not intrinsically

difficult because of specific problems linked to

coding. Coding is logical thinking, and logical

thinking is at the base of all school subjects:

languages and literature have structure, coordination,

consequences, etc.; history has causes and

consequences; geography, physics, science and

technical subjects in general have changes in the

status of something due to specific causes;

mathematics has hypotheses and theses.

Nevertheless, as we already saw, the most part of

teachers think that they are not be able to use a tool

(whatever tool) to teach students how to code.

3 THE OTHER WAY ROUND

In recent years, something has changed and excellent

and free tools have been designed. These tools are

not only ideal to introduce students of all grades to

coding but, more importantly, teachers can use them

to build their interactive lessons for all school

subjects. Therefore, learning how to use these tools

can be of help to teachers, as they can add

interactivity and multimedia to their lessons to engage

their students and help them to grasp the subject.

Learning how to use these tools, as we will show in a

moment, is really easy, even for teachers of non-

technical subjects and these tools are also easy and

fun to be used by students. Teachers can then

introduce students to the basic usage of these tool

(basic lessons of coding) and students will help

teachers in learning the most advanced features of

these tools and the best strategies to build their

interactive and multimedia lessons.

Instead of a simple, one-way teaching from

teachers to students, we propose a new path from

teachers to students and then back to teachers. This

new path will be easier to follow by teachers and,

more importantly, more proficuous, as the coding

activity will not be relegated to a subject in its own

for just a few hours a week. All subjects will teach

lessons in which the necessary coding instructions

will be explained so to better understand the main

subject of the lesson. More importantly, by explaining

a subject in a coding-driven way, the internal

mechanisms of the subject will be more clear and

under the eyes of the students.

If teachers are not ready for coding, today students

certainly are (Tapscott, 1998). They were born with

digital devices in their hands and they love using

them. In the following, we will be showing that a new

path from teacher to students to teacher is now

possible.

3.1 What Do We Need?

In order to have a single tool that can be fruitfully

used by both students and teachers we need a tool

that:

1. allow students of all ages to learn how to code

2. allow students of all ages to learn all the

important mechanisms of coding

3. allow students of all ages to develop

interesting digital products that they can share

online with their friends

4. is lightweight and multiplatform, so that it will

easily runs on all OSs and all kind of devices

(PC, tablets, smartphone) even not very recent

5. allow teachers to create interactive and

multimedia supports to their lessons

6. is easy use so that even non-technical teachers

can quickly learn how to use it

But which is the most important feature among the

ones listed above? Even if the goal of current national

projects is to allow students to learn how to code

(point 1), the most important feature, from what we

have said, is clearly number 6, closely followed by

number 5. Indeed, if teachers will not be able to

quickly grasp how to use this tool, and will not be

deeply involved in its usage, the whole project will

quickly fade away.

Figure 1: Scratch 2.0.

The basic components of such a tool are available

today thanks to new programming tools developed

during the last decade based on the metaphor of

construction blocks (block languages, Federici and

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Gola, 2014) in order to allow even small children,

starting at age of 8, to learn how to code. One of the

most famous and successful of those tools is Scratch

(figure 1), developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten

Group of the Multimedia Labs of MIT (Resnick et al,

2009).

Scratch’s interface has a stage (area 1, in figure 1)

on which several different sprites (area 2) perform

their scripts (area 3) described by a predefined set of

possible actions represented by coloured blocks in the

palette (area 4). Blocks are grouped in categories

(area 5). Blocks of a given category have the same

colour and allow the sprite to perform similar actions.

Scratch, and its sibling tools, such as Snap

(http://snap.berkeley.edu), Code.org Studio, Star

Logo (http://education.mit.edu/projects/starlogo-

tng), all have the basic features that make then ideal

tools to introduce students to coding. Indeed, they:

 are available in several different languages, so

to make it less intimidating to non-English

speaking countries

 have a predefined and always visible set of

instructions (blocks), so that users do not have

to remember what the building blocks of the

language are

 have a simple mechanism to put blocks

together, so that users can easily grasp how to

build up complex instructions starting from

simpler ones

 make available lots of easy-to-use interactive

and multimedia mechanisms so that students

can be easily engaged

 most of them run in a simple web browser, so

that nothing must be installed in order to use

them

Not all tools are ideal instrument for teachers to build

their interactive lessons. To give a few examples,

Code.Org Studio mechanisms are too simple, and

StarLogo TNG is not available as an online tool.

However, Scratch and Snap are very good candidates.

By using these tools, teachers can make their

lessons clearer and more engaging, can create and

maintain them very easily. On the other side, students

can learn how to code in a goal-oriented fashion, by

understanding how the digital lessons prepared by

their teachers have been built starting from the basic

building blocks of the language. Therefore, they

understand, at the same time, how the subject

explained is built right from the inside.

These goals can be reached if these tools are really

easy to learn and, more importantly, if teachers can

learn back from their students what their students

have learned by themselves.

3.2 Introducing Teachers of

Non-Technical Subjects to Coding.

An Experiment

In order to see if Scratch could be easily learned -

even by teachers of non-technical subjects-, we run a

small experiment (Brau, 2011). The base hypothesis

of such an experiment was that Scratch was intuitive

enough so that, after an extremely short introduction,

even teachers not very confident with technology

could nevertheless grasp the basic mechanisms of the

tool by being able i) to realize very simple behaviours

very soon by themselves and, being guided, ii) to

quickly build their first educational project. The

secondary goal of the experiment was also to gather

evidence about what should have been improved in

Scratch in order to make it really intuitive and easy to

use.

The teachers’ actions were recorded during a 2-

hours session, in order to review their behaviours.

Two of the teachers taught only language, arts,

history and geography, so they did not teach technical

subjects, whereas the other two taught also

mathematics, logics and science. All of them reached

the same results, even if the two “non-technical”

teachers had said before starting that they did not feel

confident at all using computers and that they didn’t

use indeed them in their everyday life. None of them

had ever used a programming language nor had

previously known Scratch.

After having illustrated a few projects that could

be developed with Scratch to support teaching of

several school topics (we only showed the behaviour

of the projects, not the actual code), we told them

something about Scratch: that Scratch allowed to

show images, to move them, to make them react to

the mouse, to show speech bubbles, to produce

sounds, to make images disappear and show up again.

The only elements of the Scratch interface that were

illustrated were the Green Flag button (to start

projects) and the Red Stop button (to stop projects).

Then we asked them to make something specific

happen, and left them alone, each seated at their own

PC, without the possibility of asking for suggestions

to us or to their colleagues, until they were actually

able to make that thing happen.

We asked them to perform 10 different tasks by

making, in order, the Scratch cat: say “Hello!” in a

speech bubble; say “Hello!” in a speech bubble for

only 2 seconds; say “Hello!” in a speech bubble when

the cat is clicked; say instead “I have been clicked”

when the it is clicked; change look every time it is

clicked; change look every time the space key is

pressed; play the sound “meow” every time it is

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clicked; play the sound “Bravo!” every time it is

clicked; say “Hello!” in a speech bubble for 2 seconds

and then play the sound “Bravo!” every time it is

clicked; have another cat on the Stage that’s behaves

exactly as the first one. All these tasks where

performed by all four teachers in less than an hour and

a half. Only the very first task took a little longer than

the next ones (from a minimum of 15 minutes, for one

of the technical teachers, to a maximum of 25

minutes, for the slowest of the non-technical

teachers). To perform the first task they had to

discover that there was more than one category of

blocks and that to make the cat do something it was

necessary to click a block in the palette or to drag it

to the script area and then to click it. After each task

was solved by all four teachers, we discussed the

different solutions with the teachers. At the end of the

whole session we illustrated to them what they had

discovered: that in Scratch there are several “sprites”

that can do different things on a “Stage”; that the

blocks that allow the sprites to do something are

organized in “categories” depending on their

behaviour; that the blocks can be snapped together so

that the sprites can have a whole series of behaviours

with just one click; that the sprites can change their

look; that the sprites can play different sounds; that

we can record the sounds ourselves that will be then

played by the sprites. Moreover some of the teachers

had also discovered that the images of the sprites can

be created by using an image editor internal to Scratch

or that they can be created by shooting a picture with

the internal webcam.

Figure 2: classification of lines, interactive exercise for 2

grade.

Then we guided them in building a very simple

interactive project derived from an exercise in a

science student book for the 2

grade, namely the

classification of lines (open vs. closed; polyline vs.

curve vs. mixed) in which students must select the

correct features for a few samples of lines by clicking

the correct cells in a table (see figure 2) and getting

visual feedback (figure 3).

Figure 3: classification of lines, final result. Green is

correct, red is wrong.

The result of the experiment was, in our view, a

complete success. Not only the four teachers were

able to follow us step by step, after having

experienced Scratch for less than 90 minutes,

completing a working project in 20 minutes. All of

them said that they were also very interested in using

Scratch to create interactive supports for their lessons

(language, grammar, history, geography,

mathematics, logics) as they had had no problems at

understanding how to use it. Finally, and most

important to us, they taught that Scratch could be used

by teachers with no prior knowledge in coding to

create educational projects to support their lessons.

Figure 4: old Scratch 1.4 interface (stage to the right).

As an added bonus, we had some feedback on

possible improvements to the Scratch interface, in

order to make it more intuitive.

Interestingly enough, one of their suggestion,

namely moving the Stage of Scratch 1.4 (figure 4) to

the left and side of the interface, so to make the

“natural inclusion” built-in in Scratch more clear

(scripts are made by blocks that belongs to a sprite),

has been included by the Scratch Team in the new

version of Scratch (figure 5).

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Figure 5: new Scratch 2.0 interface (stage to the left).

Finally, by analysing the teacher’s behaviour

when they were trying to perform the very first task,

we discovered that, for a first-time user, it is very

natural to try to make a sprite (e.g. the cat) doing

something by dragging a block onto the sprite on the

Stage. This is not allowed by Scratch: blocks dragged

to the Stage are just sent back to the palette.

3.3 From Teacher to Students to

Teacher. A Coding Experiment

The next point, that is that at least young students are

interested in an instrument like Scratch and that they

are able to improve their knowledge by themselves

and then transfer this knowledge back to their

teachers, was verified in a further experiment

(Zuncheddu, 2015). The base hypothesis of this

experiment was that the rich multimedia core of

Scratch could ignite the interest of young students

(two classes of the 5

grade) so that they would have

started exploring the instrument by themselves and

then would have reported their personal experiences

back to the classroom. The experiment lasted for 8

weeks, a 2-hours session of Scratch 1.4 coding per

week (we did not use the new Scratch 2.0 as it still

has some bugs that could frustrate young children).

The first interesting outcome of the experiment

was that, right after the very first lessons, several

students used Scratch at home and then, at the next

lesson, reported to the classroom what they

discovered, that is how to draw images by using the

internal image editor, how to record their voices by

using the internal recorder, but also how to play

sounds, how to make slideshow of images (shot with

the internal webcam) with a background music.

The second outcome was instead that one of

teachers of the two classes informally reported to us

that she had had detailed explanations from one of her

students about coding strategies that she had not

immediately understood during the explanation.

As for the opinion of the students at the end of the

experiment, the final outcome was that almost all of

them (except three students out of 33) said that they

would have liked to use Scratch for all subjects.

4 A BETTER TOOL

Even if Scratch, as we have already seen, is incredibly

easy to use, sometimes, in order not to make it too

complex to newbies, Scratch designers decided not to

add several features, even if those features could

make the creation of digital supports for teachers’

lessons a lot easier. These features are not relevant to

users using the tool just to learn how to code, but are

very important to users that must use the tool to

quickly develop a working project. Therefore, this

make the present version of Scratch a tool that is not

completely ideal for teachers.

Some of the important features that are missing in

Scratch are:

 scenes: currently, if we want to create a project

showing different situations (for example a

project showing how different phrases can be

split in meaningful parts) we have to hide and

show a lot of sprites and tell to those sprites how

they have to react to the user interaction for each

different situation (in our example for each

different phrase). By adding the automatic

management of different situations, or “scenes”,

the number of scripts that is necessary for each

sprite can be strongly reduced for the average

project. This is also true for multiscene games,

a kind of project that is very interesting to young

students (Zuncheddu, 2015).

 more powerful undo: currently only the last

action can be undone. This can get quickly very

frustrating

 search for named elements (variables, messages,

etc.) and strings: currently it is not possible to

find the script where a given variable, message

or string is used

 easier positioning: currently we are required to

place sprites on the stage by specifying their

coordinates (a mathematical notion that is not

very handy for non-technical teachers). It would

be better (Zuncheddu, 2015) if one could

specify the position of a sprite also by putting

marks on the stage and referring to them (like

the X signs used on real stages)

 random behaviour: currently a Scratch project

can behave differently each time it is run by

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using random numbers (another notion that is

not very handy for non technical teachers). It

would be better if one could also choose from a

small set of predefined random behaviours, for

example one behaviour to arrange elements on

the Stage in random order, another to choose

and delete an item selected at random from a list,

etc.

 dynamic interface: currently the interface has

mostly fixed proportions (only the stage can be

resized to at most two possible alternative sizes).

It would be of help if the different areas (the

script area, the palette, etc.) could occupy a

larger area of the Scratch interface when needed.

5 BEYOND SCRATCH:

SCRATCH MODS AND BLOP

Luckily enough, Scratch is an open source tool, so it

can be modified in order to add useful features.

Indeed, many mods (Scratch modifications) have

been proposed by Scratch users starting with version

1.4 of Scratch. Indeed, Scratch users have proposed

lots of mods (Scratch modifications) by starting with

version 1.4 of Scratch. The first, and most famous

among all mods, is BYOB, an excellent instrument

that aims at making available a powerful

programming language that, even in the form of a

block language, have all the most advanced

programming constructs so to be used also in

computer science courses at the university level

(Harvey and Mönig, 2010). BYOB has been recently

re-implemented into Snap, a JavaScript version of

BYOB running in all major browsers (Harvey, 2012).

The advanced programming constructs that are

available in BYOB and Snap have made possible the

development of the BloP platform (Federici and Gola,

2014). BloP (http://blocklanguages.org) is a tool that

allows very easily to create new block languages,

either the re-implementation of simplified versions of

standard languages -such as C/C++, Logo, PHP,

MySQL (Federici, 2011)- or completely new special

purpose languages such as the Animated Sort

Language (Federici and Stern, 2011). All this just

using the simple blocks available in Scratch/Snap and

embedding them in a safe environment, that is an

environment that cannot be modified by students.

This could allow the most motivated teachers to

develop special-purpose programming languages for

their specific subjects, such as, for example, a

“Linguistic” programming language that could allow

students to understand how correct sentences are built

by putting together linguistic constructs (e.g. articles,

names, verbs, etc.), or an “Artistic” programming

language allowing students to learn how to mix

colours together. The only limit, as always, is our

fantasy.

6 SUPPORTING THE

DIGITAL TEACHER:

SCRATCHED, REMIXES,

NON-CS STUDIOS

A new tool and a completely new way of teaching can

be scaring to teachers not familiar with digital tools.

Even if the primary school teachers involved in the

Brau’s experiment where all positive about the

possibility of using Scratch as an educational

instruments in their lessons, radically changing the

way teachers teach is something that can get

frustrating and teachers could soon abandon the tool

if they do not feel supported in this process. Involving

the students can be a great form of support for what

concerns how to use the tool, but teachers should have

a substantial basis of sample projects and examples

for all possible subjects and levels from which to start

to develop their own projects. ScratchEd

(http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu), the website

dedicated to Scratch educators that let teachers be in

touch with other teachers and share resources and

stories about using Scratch for computer science

lessons, can be a great resource for useful ideas about

teaching Scratch. However, it is not the ideal source

for teachers of other subjects looking for inspiration

and strategies about teaching with Scratch.

Luckily, many non-computer science teachers

already use Scratch and share their projects on the

Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu). Projects

shared on the website can be freely downloaded and

modified (remixed, in Scratch terminology) to create

our own versions. During the last 2 years, we daily

browsed the Scratch projects uploaded to the website

in order to collect educational projects designed by

teachers or by students to teach specific arguments for

school subjects for all levels. We then arranged the

collected projects in 10 “studios” (“studio” is the

scratch name for a collection of projects) about

“Language” (about 250 projects), “Foreign

Languages” (150), “History” (100), “Geography”

(150), “Music” (200), “Mathematics” (700),

“Sciences” (1300), “Logics” (400), “Physics” (500),

“Arts” (1000). Even if not all the about 4000 projects

we collected are perfect and well designed, there are

very good projects among them and, moreover, they

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are a very small part of the more than 8 million

projects available on the Scratch website.

How are teachers supposed to be able to browse 8

million projects? When becoming a member of the

Scratch website, teachers will soon be able to spot

those members that share projects interesting to them.

By becoming a follower of those members they will

be able to know when they share further -hopefully

interesting- projects but also when they appreciate

projects by other members that, likely, will be of

interest also to them. That is how we built our 4000

educational projects collection.

7 CONCLUSIONS

Coding is an essential skill for young generations.

Block languages such as Scratch, Snap and BloP can

become the pen of the 21

century. We have shown

that very likely not only they could be easily learned

by teachers but also that teachers could use them to

create their digital lessons and, at the same time, train

their students and be trained by them on coding.

The incredible amount of available resources and

the positive feedback that teachers can get from their

students is the key that make us confident that this

new way of teaching could be a success.

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