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Teaching Software Engineering Principles to K-12 Students: A MOOC on Scratch by Felienne Hermans; Efthimia Aivaloglou is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Teaching Software Engineering Principles to K-12 Students: A MOOC on Scratch about?

In the last few years, many books, online puzzles, apps and games have been created to teach young children programming. However, most of these do not introduce children to broader concepts from software engineering, such as debugging and code quality issues like smells, duplication, refactoring and naming. To address this, we designed and ran an online introductory Scratch programming course in which we teach elementary programming concepts and software engineering concepts simultaneously. In total 2,220 children actively participated in our course in June and July 2016, most of which (73%) between the ages of 7 and 11. In this paper we describe our course design and analyze the resulting data. More specifically, we investigate whether 1) students find programming concepts more difficult than software engineering concepts, 2) there are age-related differences in their performance and 3) we can predict successful course completion. Our results show that there is no difference in students' scores between the programming concepts and the software engineering concepts, suggesting that it is indeed possible to teach these concepts to this age group. We also find that students over 12 y

Author

Felienne Hermans; Efthimia Aivaloglou

Publisher

IEEE

Published

2017

Language

EN