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.
With the arrival of the Hour of Code on Thursday for my school, this was a very interesting article. I totally agree that Scratch is a program that offers some problem thinking that non-computer programmers will not be used to. However, Scratch is definitely a good place to start for beginners. The block system does a fantastic job of lessening the cognitive load and giving students pieces of information to learn how a string of commands work. Personally, I wanted a more advanced system and I went to GameMaker. That program definitely made me think hard, especially when my characters got stuck moving on the platforms (I then realized that I needed to not click the “make solid” option and I would have to program it to make the platforming work better. That only happened after trial-and-error and research). Overall, great article in connecting gaming with problem-solving.
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