=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2733/paper27
|storemode=property
|title=Gamification Experience with Scratch in Teaching Programming in a Vocational Training Classroom
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2733/paper27.pdf
|volume=Vol-2733
|authors=Antonio García-Gutierrez,Raquel Hijón-Neira
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/siie/Garcia-Gutierrez20
}}
==Gamification Experience with Scratch in Teaching Programming in a Vocational Training Classroom==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2733/paper27.pdf
Gamification Experience with Scratch in Teaching
Programming in a Vocational Training Classroom
Antonio García-Gutierrez Raquel Hijón-Neira
Computer Science Department Computer Science Department
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
Móstoles, Madrid, España Móstoles, Madrid, España
a.garciagu.2018@alumnos.urjc.es https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3833-4228
Abstract— This article analyzes the impact that the use of an increasing their commitment and increasing their
application with gamified environments can have on the participation.
learning of theoretical programming concepts and on the
development of students' computational thinking. The It is reasonable to think that an activity that is surrounded
application offers theoretical and practical learning by a similar technological environment and that uses the same
environments based on the Scratch programming software. For components and dynamics as these games can motivate and
this analysis, a pilot experience has been carried out in which change the student's perception of academic activities,
the application is tested with students. The aim is to analyze the resulting in more attractive and motivating performance.
progress of both the student's learning of theoretical concepts Three lines of work stand out that seek to gamify education..
and the development of computational thinking. For this, two
tests have been carried out, analyzing the results, collecting data The first seeks to use games in a controlled way, the
by performing a pre-test and post-test. teacher chooses the game and the moment, so that the student
acquires the skills and abilities that are supposed to appear in
Keywords— Programming, Computational Thinking, Scratch, them. The second way seeks to use the characteristic elements
Gamification of the games (the levels, the points, the medals, the interface
...) to take advantage of the students' predisposition to play to
I. INTRODUCTION increase the motivation for learning. The third way is to
Currently, video games are one of the most direct ways redesign a learning process as if it were a game. The teacher
that children and young people have to interact with must design the subject in such a way that the student has to
computers. Their ability to encourage participation can be of play and acquire knowledge, skills and competences [1].
great help when it comes to involving the student and fostering It is necessary to define what conditions a process must
a competition that encourages learning by awarding badges. meet to be considered a game or object to be gamified. The
By promoting a context of participation, the student breaks requirements or conditions are reduced to the fact that the
with the feeling of frustration that the appearance of obstacles activity carried out by the game or process can be learned by
in their training can cause and is useful to motivate students to the user, that the feedback can be delivered in a pertinent way
carry out tasks that are complicated. to the user and that the actions carried out by the player
An experience is presented in the use of an application for throughout the development of the game. process or activity
the teaching of programming and computational thinking of can be measured [2].
gamification in professional training. A pilot experience was
carried out that consisted of carrying out a pre-test of
theoretical knowledge and computational thinking. Once the
tests prior to the interventions had been carried out, theoretical
concepts were explained from the Scratch-based application,
making examples of the different concepts.
Once the interventions had been completed and all the
concepts were explained, a post-test was carried out to
evaluate the students' progress, comparing the results obtained
both in the pre-test and in the post-test and determining if there
had been significant progress.
II. STATE OF THE ART
A. Status of Gamification
Figure 1. Hierarchy of gamification elements [3]
Nowadays, society is faced with numerous technological
and social changes. Technology changes the way society The components suppose the badges, points, rankings and
interacts and facilitates access to new knowledge. other elements that manage to implement the mechanical and
Gamification responds to this need for motivation, dynamic elements. The mechanical elements are made up of
transporting game scenarios to formal educational contexts, in all those elements that make the game user act in the game. It
order to involve students and open the door to the acquisition can be the obtaining of a reward, a challenge or the same
of learning. To do this, it is necessary to surround students in competition between users within the same class or center.
playful environments, facing challenges and missions, Finally, the dynamic part is made up of the concept of the
game.
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
To achieve the objective, the game must integrate all these Another interesting example for the introduction of
elements, in addition to achieving the student's motivation, theoretical concepts and computational thinking at an early
which may be intrinsic, when the student seeks to carry out age is RoDy. It consists of two parts: on the one hand, an
activities for their own interest, or extrinsic, when the student application that allows teachers to generate their own
performs the tasks for a reward you can get. activities according to the syllabus and, on the other hand, a
robot that allows students to interact with the application. This
The teaching of programming is closely tied to robot is represented in the game by a virtual agent in the shape
computational thinking. Solving the problems using a series of a bear, which will interact with users through dialogues [7].
of instructions structured and sequenced in such a way that
they allow to reach the resolution of the problem. As a future project for the integration of gamification in
the classroom, it is worth highlighting the proposal of the
Therefore, it is necessary that, when learning GameMo module for Moodle, which will allow integrating the
programming, students structure the resolution of a problem most common elements of gamified courses within the
analytically; analyzing the problem and establishing and Moodle platform, thus facilitating the teaching work for the
ordering a series of steps to follow to solve the problem. implementation of gamified courses. Once an initial prototype
A simple tool when working on computational thinking is has been developed, it will be tested in real environments by
Scratch, since it allows the student to interact with a simple means of a quantitative usability assessment, leaving it open
programming language, in which the programming language to future improvements after tests in real environments [6].
is sequenced by blocks, eliminating much of the complexity
B. Hypothesis
of the programming languages. programming and allowing
focus on the logic and structure of problem solving, thus Due to the need to study and analyze the impact that the
working computational thinking. application can achieve in the learning and development of the
theoretical concepts of programming and computational
It is worth highlighting the role that the Dr. Scratch thinking. Therefore, the hypotheses to be determined are the
application can play in this part of learning. This application
following:
allows you to correct, analyze and catalog the degree of
• H1: With the methodology / intervention proposal,
learning of a project by assigning a score distributed among
learning in programming concepts can be improved.
the different computational concepts.
• H2: With the methodology / intervention proposal,
It is important to highlight the analysis of the Dr. Scratch
one can improve the learning of Computational Thinking.
application that was carried out in a program made up of 109
elementary and high school students in which it was intended III. METHODOLOGY
to analyze the progress of computational thinking using the
Scratch programming tool. To do this, some work sessions The methodology to be followed in the interventions
with Scratch were carried out, and the Dr. Scratch tool was consists of developing the theoretical concepts outlined in the
also presented to the students so that students could practice, application guide. The development of the concepts consists
develop and correct their own codes through the tool. of a first theoretical part in which the teacher explains and
defines the concept that will be worked on in that topic, and
To measure the progress of these students, a pre-test and later a practical part in which the student interacts with
post-test were carried out before and after practicing with the different programs developed in the software-based
tool. The results were analyzed by means of a t-test, application Scratch programming.
establishing a level of significance alpha = 0.05, returning a
result of p <0.05, so it could be stated that the learning was For the development of the interventions a local web
significant. application is used that uses the Scratch block programming
software.
Another significant experience was the development of a
study carried out in sixth grade students whose objective was At the beginning of the application there is a main page
to verify whether the Scratch programming tool allows the where the different topics to be developed by the students are
development of computational thinking. The methodology of shown. The application consists of two parts, presentations
work with these subjects consists of 4 phases. (Figure 2) and practical (Figure 3).
A first phase in which a Scratch guide is developed as a
learning resource. The guide consists of 5 units in which
different activities are developed that increase the difficulty.
The guide is aimed at subjects who do not have any knowledge
of programming and use of Scratch.
A second phase where the guide is developed with the
students and proposed exercises are worked on. This second
phase occupies 14 sessions of 45 minutes where the subjects
work with the teacher the concepts and activities proposed in
the guide. In the third phase, the evaluation of computational
thinking is carried out by means of a test.
In the last phase, the analysis of the data obtained is carried
out. Due to the positive results obtained, it can be concluded
that the Scratch programming software is a good tool to Figure 2. Screen of the interactive presentation of
develop computational thinking at an early age [5]. the theoretical concepts on Computational Thinking
% ALUMNOS CON CONOCIMIENTOS EN
SCRATCH
33% NADA
POCO
67%
Figure 4 Percentage of students with prior
computer knowledge
Figure 3 Scratch Practice Screen. In the second intervention, the activity was resumed from
the point where the previous session left off. The session
The presentation part is used to support the teacher in the lasted 50 minutes and the rest of the concepts (loops, events,
presentation and development of theoretical questions. It parallelism and computational thinking) were explained. In
offers an environment in the form of a blackboard in which addition, the two post-tests were carried out, thus ending the
theoretical questions are exposed, defining the concepts interventions.
explained clearly and schematically and giving simple
examples from day to day, thus facilitating the understanding B. Data collection
of the theoretical concept. Two tests were used to collect samples. The first of them
The practical part offers an interactive environment in has been used to analyze the progress of knowledge of
which the student can put into practice the concepts previously theoretical concepts, and the second has been used to measure
progress in computational thinking experienced by the student
explained by the teacher. For this, the application has different
thanks to the application. The research carried out is carried
exercises developed with the Scratch programming software.
out within the framework of quantitative research, describing
The topics developed in the application are the following: the observed reality and establishing a cause-effect
relationship, explaining the results obtained. A quasi-
Topic 1: Sequences. experimental method will be followed, since due to the
Topic 2: Variables and data. number of students it has not been possible to separate the
sample into a test group and a control group. The two tests
Topic 3: Operators. (pre-tests) will be applied before starting the sessions, and the
two tests at the end (post-tests).
Topic 4: Conditionals.
To carry out both questionnaires, the Google Docs forms
Topic 5: Loops.
tool has been used due to the ease of use and accessibility of
Topic 6: Events. the application.
Topic 7: Parallelism and synchronization. The theoretical knowledge test consists of 16 questions,
both multiple choice questions and open questions. The
Topic 8: Computational thinking. objective of the test is to evaluate how the application has
influenced the learning of theoretical concepts. An example of
IV. EXPERIMENTATION the questions that make up the theoretical knowledge test is
A. Participants and sequencing shown in Figure 5.
The participants are 1st grade administrative students, a
group made up of 9 students aged between 16 and 17 years.
The students belong to an institute in the province of Toledo.
This group is chosen for accessibility and availability of the
sample. Figure 4 shows the level of programming knowledge
of the participating students. Most of them state that they do
not have any prior knowledge about programming and,
furthermore, they see theoretical concepts as abstract and
difficult to understand.
In the first intervention, the activity was explained to the
students. Before starting to work with the application, the
theoretical concepts and computational thinking pre-tests
were carried out. The session took place with the regular
teacher, where the activity was explained to the students. The Figure 5 Theoretical concepts test
duration of the session was 50 minutes and the concepts The computational thinking test consists of 28 questions,
sequences, variables, operators and conditionals were with closed questions in which the student must choose
explained with examples in Scratch. between 4 options, only one of them being the correct answer
(Figure 6). The computational thinking test is based on the To verify that learning has been significant in the
work carried out by Román González, establishing the criteria computational thinking test, the T_test is performed again,
for the elaboration of the test [4]. obtaining in this case a p-value = 0.316 that is greater than the
alpha value = 0.05 (see Table 2 and Figure 8).
Table 2 Results T-test theoretical concepts
Typ.
Var. Obs. Min. Max. Media Devia
.
PRE-
TEST
GRADE 9 1,071 7,143 5,198 1,899
POST-
TEST
GRADE 9 2,500 8,214 5,675 2,146
Figure 6 Computational thinking test
C. Analysis of the results
To evaluate the degree of significance of the learning of
the theoretical concepts, the t_test for dependent samples has
been performed, obtaining the following results (see Table 1
and Figure 7):
Table 1 Results T-test theoretical concepts
Typ.
Var. Obs. Min. Max. Media Devia
. Figure 8 Boxplot of the t_test for the Computational Thinking
samples.
PRE-
TEST
GRADE 9 1,538 4,038 2,393 0,764 Although in most cases a slight evolution is observed (see
POST- Figure 6), this is not significant as has been observed in the
TEST learning of theoretical concepts. In addition, we find the
GRADE 9 2,692 6,154 4,509 1,397 average obtained both in the pre-test and post-test (marked
with quite a few crosses) quite close to each other. This lower
evolution is attributed to the fact that computational thinking
The results observed in Table 1 and in Figure 7, on which requires a systematic change in the way of thinking,
the t_test has been carried out, show a value p = 0.002, well analyzing and approaching problems much more profound
below the alpha value = 0.05, so it can be stated that learning than that obtained during the development of the sessions.
the concepts theoretical has been significant. Analyzing separately the results obtained in the different
theoretical concepts, it is observed that the concepts that have
presented the most difficulty among the students have been
the concepts of events, conditionals and variables. Instead, the
concepts where the greatest progress can be seen have been
the concepts of parallelism, events, and operators.
V. CONCLUSIONS
When comparing the results obtained with the results
obtained in the experience described in section II. State of the
art, in which the Dr. Scratch tool was used for its analysis, it
is observed that the development of computational thinking is
not significant, unlike the results analyzed with the use of the
Dr. Scratch application that are described in that study.
Although in the present study, the learning of theoretical
Figure 7 Boxplot of the t_test for samples of theoretical concepts has been significant, the application for the teaching
concepts of programming and computational thinking used has not had
enough impact to achieve the development of computational
thinking with a sufficiently significant degree. The main encouraged to participate. actively. The concepts that the
difference with respect to the previous study is that the students previously perceived as abstract and difficult to
members of the study of this tool worked for weeks using the understand have been worked on in an easy way interacting
Scratch application, achieving a knowledge base that would with the different examples designed in Scratch, which allow
help them progress more quickly when they started working the assimilation of theoretical concepts.
with the Dr. Scratch.
At the beginning, the students had a certain feeling of
rejection of the intervention approach, when they conceived ACKNOWLEDGMENT
the programming as something difficult and distant. Thanks to This work has been funded by the research projects
the intervention, most of the students abandoned this feeling iPROG: New generation of tools for learning Programming
that causes ignorance of concepts, they learned that with emerging interactive technologies from MINECO (ref.
programming is based on thoughts and logic present in
TIN2015-66731-C2-1-R) and e-Madrid: Research and
everyday life. At the end of the sessions, although it is not
directly related to the professional field of the higher grade, Development of Educational Technologies in the Community
the activity was very well received by the students. of Madrid (ref. P2018 / TCS-4307).
In view of the results, the duration of the interventions has REFERENCES
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understand theoretical concepts that they conceived as
difficult. After the sessions, the students have significantly
improved their knowledge of these concepts, thus confirming
the first hypothesis raised. This has not been the case in
computational thinking, in which more sessions may be
needed to provoke a more profound change in the
methodology and approach that these students have to address
problems (second hypothesis). The results reflected in the t-
test indicate that, although there is an improvement and a
development in the learning of computational thinking, it does
not reach a significant degree, rejecting the second hypothesis
raised.
One possible reason may be that the study subjects did not
have previous programming knowledge, therefore, it is
possible that the duration of the sessions and the application
work, although they have had positive results, have been
insufficient to achieve a significant development of the
program. computational thinking. How aspects of
improvement can be considered increasing the number and
time of the sessions, being able to delve more deeply into the
contents of the application.
The work with the students has been fun and fluid and, in
general, they have perceived the sessions as something
positive, a way of learning in a fun way, creating a relaxed
atmosphere in the class dynamics in which the students were