The Effect of Scratch and Lego Mindstorms Programming Activities on Problem Solving

The Effect of Scratch Programming Activities on Problem Solving Skills.

     According to the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), computational thinking not only helps uncover the possible ways to solve a problem, but also uses human creativity and critical thinking to enable computers to enhance human problem solving capacity (ISTE, 2015). In other words, computational thinking helps students develop problem solving skills. In the article written by Ozgen Korkmaz, a study was completed to determine exactly how much of an impact Scratch and Lego Mindstorms programming activities had on increasing a students problem solving skills.
     Scratch was developed within the scope of a project conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (Korkmaz, 2016). Scratch is a media rich digital environment that utilizes a building block command structure to manipulate graphic, audio, and video aspects. Students essentially drag and drop tiles of commands to control, or program, different elements they have placed within their program. This allows individuals, who are beginning programming, to understand and acquire programming logic and algorithm thinking skills more easily (Korkmaz, 2016). According to the article, there have been many studies on Scratch that prove students find the program fun and easy to use. Many other studies have shown that Scratch has a positive impact on improving a students problem solving and critical thinking skills.
     The aim of this article's study was to determine how well scratch helped improve problem solving skills compared to traditional mathematical teaching methods of programming. The students in this study entered with what was defined as medium level problem solving skills (Korkmaz, 2016). According to the results the Scratch related game activities made a more positive contribution to logical mathematical problem solving skills of students than the traditional education program did (Korkmaz, 2016). It was also determined that the Scratch environment was suitable for learning and helped develop problem solving creativity in students (Korkmaz, 2016).

References

ISTE. (2015). CT Leadership toolkit. Available at
     http://www.iste.org/docs/ct-documents/ct-   leadershipt-toolkit.pdf?sfvrsn=4

Korkmaz, O. (2016). The Effect of Scratch and Lego Mindstorms Ev3- Based
     Programming Activities on Academic Achievement, Problem-Solving Skills and Logical
     Mathematical Thinking Skills of Students. Malaysian Online Journal of Educational Sciences,
     (3), 73-88.

Scaffolding in Programming to Reduce Cognitive Load in a PBL Environment

     Computer programming is a course that many students find challenging and struggle to perform well in. According to Stuart Garner, one of the reasons for this is that students experience a very high cognitive load during their learning (2002). Specifically, Computer programming has a high intrinsic load and it is, therefore, necessary to reduce the extraneous load as much as possible by using scaffolding techniques (Garner, 2002). Intrinsic cognitive load is the load that is determined by the mental demands of a particular task. In computer programming this demand is fairly high for novice learners. The extraneous cognitive load consists of the learning format and style that is used in the teaching process. Teachers have control over how they structure the learning process and thus have an impact on the extraneous cognitive load of the learning.
     Many programming teachers will try the innovative approach of problem based learning to engage and instruct novice programming students. This approach can prove very effective when appropriately and correctly applied in the programming classroom. Programming is by it's nature a problem oriented task. Students must identify problems and then construct solutions in a coded language to solve the problem. This lends itself to a very hands on approach and fits directly with the constructivist learning theory that stresses the importance of learners being engaged in constructing their own knowledge (Hmelo-Silver et al, 2007). However, this problem based approach "requires scaffolding to help students engage in sense making, managing their investigations and problem-solving processes" (Hmelo-Silver et al, 2007).
     Garner makes the point that in programming this scaffolding can take shape and he recommends two ways in which to accomplish it to reduce the cognitive load of the learning. First, he suggests "that students should annotate worked examples with information about what they do or what they illustrate (2002). This process forces the students to interact with previously written code and extract meaning from the work that they can carry forward into other problem based situations. Secondly, he suggests to "use incomplete, well-structured and understandable program examples that require students to generate the missing code to complete the examples" (2002). This forces students to study incomplete examples and draw conclusions about what is missing and carry that forward to future problems.



References:

Garner, S. (2002). Reducing the Cognitive Load on Novice Programmers.

Hmelo-Silver, C., Duncan, R., & Chinn, C. (2007). Scaffolding and achievement in problem

based and inquiry learning: a response to Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006). Educational
Psychologist, 42(2), 99-107