Designing and comparing two Scratch-based teaching approaches for students aged 10-12 years — extended version

Abstract

Programming and computational thinking are becoming more important in primary education. This raises the question of how different approaches to teaching programming in primary schools compare with each other. We designed two approaches to teach programming to primary school students. One approach uses the instructionistic 4C/ID model, the other approach uses constructionism. The learning gains of these two approaches were compared using a pre- and post test. In total, 129 students from two di!erent schools participated. A signi"cant di!erence (p = .037, d = .59) between the two approaches was found on one of the schools, favoring the 4C/ID approach. On the other school and for the total group no signi"cant di!erence was found. This is explained by the di!erent backgrounds between the students from the di!erent schools.