Introduction
To make matters worse, if this teacher went to a recent state computer conference, he may see presentation titles like this: Transforming Teaching through Technology using Early Childhood Podcasting, The Virtual Pioneers- Social Studies in a Virtual World, SMARTBoards for the Primary Grades (NYSCATE, 2009). * So, where does he start teaching if the latest and greatest technology integration models are nothing he understands? As the types of technology choices continue to increase, exponentially it seems, so do the demands on teachers to prepare children for the high-stakes tests, individualize or differentiate instruction (Tomlinson, 1999) and prepare them for what Seymour (2006) calls the “Innovation Economy”, an economy built on collaboration, improvisation, and creativity.
Imagine if teachers did not have to teach computer applications. What if children were able to learn these computer applications on their own, without a teacher? Is it possible for children to learn a computer application by themselves or with the help of other children? And if children were able to learn without a teacher, what would that learning look like?
Research, conducted in the slums and rural areas of India, has demonstrated that children can learn computer applications and develop computer skills without any adult supervision. These studies, coined the Hole-in-the-Wall studies, began in 1999, show that young children use a variety of learning strategies when they are alone and when they work in a group (Mitra, 2000; Inamder, 2004; Danwal, Swati, Chatterjee and Mitra, 2005; Dangwal and Kapur, 2008; Danwal and Kapur, 2009).
So if research has shown that a sample of children can learn computer applications on their own, as indicated by the Hole-in-the-Wall studies, then this might mean that teachers might be relieved of teaching computer applications. The next question becomes which computer application should children begin to learn on their own?
Scratch, the Application of Choice
For my field study, I chose a very versatile application, designed especially for kids, called Scratch. Scratch is freely available as a download from the Scratch website, will run on all three major operating systems: Macintosh, Linux and Windows and is one of the few programs that can be run from a USB flash drive, thus making it an extremely desirable application to use in a school setting and at home.
Scratch is a visual programming application designed for children because it eliminates confusing debugging activities and syntax errors, which are two major obstacles for beginning programmers. Children can drag blocks of code into a scripting area to manipulate graphical objects, thus eliminating the need to memorize code. These blocks of codes can even be manipulated while the scripts are running, thus allowing children to “focus on the problems they want to solve and not the programming” (Resnick, Maloney, Monroy-Hernández, Rusk, Eastmond, Brennan, 2009). Scratch enables children to import or record sounds effects and music files and when projects get completed, they can be uploaded to the MIT servers to be shared with the world. (Peppler and Kafai, 2005; Peppler and Kafai, 2007; Resnick et al., 2009)
Scratch was officially released to the public in May 2007 and since that time a number of studies have been conducted in a popular after-school program called the Computer Clubhouse or in other urban after-school places (Peppler and Kafai, 2005; Kafai, Peppler, and Chiu, 2007; Peppler and Kafai, 2007; Maloney, Peppler, Kafai, Resnick and Rusk, 2008). Research has not been conducted in a school setting, let alone an elementary school (Peppler and Kafai, 2005). In my paper, I will show how four third grade children used a variety of learning strategies to learn Scratch in the same manner as the children in the Hole-in-the-Wall studies, without any adult supervision.
Research Questions
Literature Review
In 2007, a survey was conducted on behalf of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The results of the survey indicate that 55% of American youths, aged 12 – 17, have used social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook (Lenhart and Madden, 2007). From 2000 – 2009, the use of social networking sites has increased more than any other online activity. In fact, use of social networking sites increased almost 14% between 2006-7 and 2008-9 (Online Activities. Pew Internet & American Life Project Surveys, 2009). This is quite remarkable considering social networking usage was not even tracked until 2004-5. It is clear that older youths and adults find value in sharing ideas and building on those ideas in an informal context. In this paper, I will present a social model of learning that couples an old-fashioned social network with a new social technology designed for young students.Traditional models of school have put a lot of value on an individual’s ability to perform tasks designated to be important by the teacher (Scardarmalia, and Berieter, 1991). The evidence to support this claim can be found in how most classrooms are organized; students have an individual desk, report card, and text books. Students demonstrate their learning by taking individual assessments given by the teacher, school and state. Teachers usually only assess their student’s formal knowledge and demonstrable skills (Scardarmalia, and Berieter, 1991) because that is what appears on the high-stakes tests. They usually do not teach students how to think about their own thinking; learning is formal and teacher directed. This is in contrast to informal learning which is self-directed, exploratory and involves social interactions (Maloney, Burd, Kafai, Rusk, Silverman, and Resnick, 2004). This informal learning is the foundational concept of my paper.
The formal, teacher-directed model of education has influenced the way teachers consider delivering instruction for many years. The focus of many college pre-service teacher education courses is on teaching teachers how to teach, not how to facilitate self-directed student learning. In a video conference to Japanese educators sometime in the 1980s, Seymour Papert (1980) spoke about this model which he labeled as “Instructionism.” He called Instuctionism a theory that states, that in order to improve education, teachers need to improve their instruction. This Instructionist theory conflicts with the theory of Constuctionism, which states, that people learn best when they are actively designing their own activities (Papert and Harel, 1991; Papert, 1993; Mitra, 2005; Stager, 2005; Peppler and Kafai, 2005; Peppler and Kafai, 2007). Constuctionism is theory that provides the framework for this paper.
In 1999, the Constuctionist Learning Laboratory was established for at-risk teens in the state of Maine who had been sent to this particular juvenile home (Stager, 2005). In this lab, students were empowered to create meaningful projects based on their own self interests that were not assessed with a rubric, quiz or test. Students learned for the sake of learning. Stager found that as the students successfully solved problems with their constructed designs, a powerful sense of personal competence emerged. This self-awareness provided the students with the confidence to solve the new problems as that arose in their projects. Informal interviews, conducted during the study, showed that the students believed that they were more curious of the world around them and that working on their projects made them better thinkers.
In a case study conducted by Peppler and Kafai (2005), the researchers also found that children who participate in a constuctionist learning environment are more competent and are able to make personal and epistemological connections to their self-directed work. In their study they documented the work of two young artists who used the Scratch application to create media-rich works of art. Because of the design of Scratch, one young artist was able to insert images of herself, a form of personal expression and control, by programming, the characters she inserted into her work. Peppler and Kafai’s findings support Papert’s (1980) idea that, when a child learns to program, the process of learning is transformed. It becomes more active and self-directed. In particular, the knowledge is acquired for a recognizable personal purpose (pg. 21). This recognizable purpose, when coupled with providing students the flexibility to follow their interests, makes learning more motivating, interesting and engaging which leads to success (Rose and Meyer, 2002).
As students construct their own learning, they begin to build a storehouse of knowledge which can be shared across social networks. These social networks can be found within the row of desks, the walls of a classroom or school, the community and finally the world. Scardamalia and Bereiter (2007) suggest children should contribute to knowledge building and move past learning. They define learning as “an internal, unobservable process that results in changes of belief, attitude, or skill,” (pg. 2). In contrast, those that build knowledge contribute to the public knowledge, which replaces or modifies existing knowledge. The students in Stager (2005), Peppler and Kafai’s (2005) studies did not build knowledge as defined by Scardamalia and Bereiter, but one student, in a different Peppler and Kafai (2007) study, did build knowledge for the public.
In an ongoing ethnographic study documenting youth producing video games in a community design studio, Peppler and Kafai (2007) found a young Scratch programmer’s status change within his after-school clubhouse community. The after-school program did not require the participants to use any particular computer program, so they were allowed to work with any medium they chose which increased the participant’s enthusiasm for learning (Rose and Meyer, 2002). The researchers analyzed the project of one particular programmer who participated in the online Scratch community on a regular basis. He was able to download projects from the Scratch website which helped him learn new skills and distribute his new knowledge to his local community. He also published his work on the same website and was able to add to the public knowledge base regarding Scratch.
My field study was inspired by the Hole-in-the-Wall studies (Mitra, 2000; Dangwal and Kapur; 2009). In these studies, the researcher placed computers in the slums and poor countrysides of India to find out if children could learn computer skills without the assistance of an adult. The researchers learned that the children could learn computer skills using a variety of strategies. It is with this inspiration, that I wanted to find out if students could learn the Scratch application in a school setting without the assistance of an adult.
Method
A qualitative research approach was chosen for this exploratory case study for two reasons. The first reason is to examine how children learn a computer application without the assistance of an adult, how knowledge is transferred within a group and lastly, how children can build on other children’s ideas. The second reason lies in the method of collecting data (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). The data I collected came from the children in the forms of observations, artifact collection, and one interview.In this section of my paper, I will describe the methods used to implement my field study. I will explain the role of the researcher, the participants, the setting of the research site, the data sources collected, the methods I used to analyze the data, the establishment of trustworthiness and the nomenclature of the Scratch program.
The Role of the Researcher
As a technology integrator in the district where the study was conducted, the children saw me as their computer teacher. My involvement with them in years past depended on their classroom teacher. For the purpose of this research, I choose the role of a passive participant (Spradley, 1980). In this role, I did not interact with the children; I sat behind them and observed from a distance of two feet.
Participants
The participants in this study were 4 Caucasian third-grade children, two boys, and two girls, in a 3-5 elementary school located in a rural-suburban school district in the Midwest. One boy and one girl were provided with Individualized Education Plans (IEP) by school personnel; the other two children did not receive special services and were considered general education children. Pseudonyms were given to each of the children to protect their confidentiality. Karen and Brad were the children with the IEPs and Julie and John were the other two children without the IEPs. According to their teacher, John was an above reader and Julie and Brad were average readers. Karen was pulled out for reading by the Special Education teacher and was considered a non-reader. In Math, John was above average, Julie was an average student and Brad had a difficult time focusing. Karen was also pulled out for math. Brad has been classified as language delayed and Karen, as learning disabled.
These children were in a co-teaching classroom because 7 out of 22 children had IEPs. The general education teacher and special education teacher worked in the same classroom to co-plan and co-teach lessons.
The Setting of Field Study
Technology Integration. Children are exposed to technology beginning in Kindergarten and in some elementary classrooms, technology is used to learn every day. Teachers integrate technology into the general education curriculum in a variety of formats. The only computer programming available to children occurs in the high school when children can take an Adobe Flash elective.
The general education teacher integrates technology on a daily basis, but most of the integration requires the children to use web resources to practice skills, such as learning math facts, spelling words and using interactive electronic workbooks. The special education teacher does not integrate technology because she does not feel comfortable with "the basics."
Flexible Groups. The teachers used flexible-group learning centers twice a week so that the teachers could provide individualized instruction in reading and children with IEPs could work on IEP goals. Children are initially placed in flexible groups after having taken a Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI) at the beginning of the year. As the year progresses, the teachers use the reading placement tests provided by the Scott Foresman reading series and a “feel” that the teachers have about a child’s reading ability, to organize the groups. The general education teacher pulls children to her reading center as the children rotate through the various center activities. The special education teacher pulls her children to her center to work on various IEP goals. At the reading center and the center provided by the special education teacher, children work with the children with similar reading needs. At the other centers, children are heterogeneously grouped.
Children spend 20 minutes at five different centers: writing, math, reading, listening and technology. Aside from the technology center, the other centers are aligned with a story read by the teacher before the children visit the center. On one particular occasion the teacher read the book A Bad Case of the Stripes by David Shannon. At the writing center the children wrote a story based on the Bad Case of the Stripes story, at the math center they reviewed math concepts while playing on a game board with the Bad Case of the Stripes theme, they listened to a similar story at the listening center, at the reading center they worked on a variety of reading skills with the general education teacher and at the technology center, they learned the Scratch program which was pre-loaded on portable USB drives.
Data Collection
Since this was a qualitative study, data was collected with techniques used by qualitative researchers (Bogdan and Bilken, 1992). Data was collected from three sources: an expanded account of my condensed field notes as recommended by Spradley (1980), artifacts in the form of saved Scratch projects (Graue and Walsh, 1998) one group interview with the children and one peer debriefing (Lincoln and Guba, 1985) consultation with the classroom teachers.I observed the group for twenty minutes, twice weekly for three weeks. I focused on the learning strategies used by the children as they explored the application and wrote a condensed version of my observations in a field journal. After each session I followed the advice of Denzin, (as cited in Graue and Walsh, 1998, p. 134) who suggested that researchers expand their field notes to create a “thick description."
At the end of each session, student projects were saved onto the USB drives and then copied to an external hard drive. When I saved the projects, I only saved what the children were working on at the end of the session. The saved projects did not reflect all of the actions taken by the student (this is a limitation of my study elaborated on later in this paper).
At the end of the study, I conducted a group interview with the children so that they felt more comfortable with the interview process and so that they could build on each other’s answers (Graue and Walsh, 1998). I did not conduct informal interviews with the children as a way to implement member checking (Lincoln and Guba, 1985) because I did not want to influence the behavior of the children (Bogdan and Bilken, 1992). I used the peer-debriefing technique with the general education teacher to review the field notes and the saved Scratch projects so that she could verify my observations. (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).
Data Analysis
Data were analyzed in three different ways. The first analysis applied to the data was conducted with open coding techniques. Data from field notes and saved projects were examined to discover phenomena in the date which were first labeled and then later organized into categories (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). Once labels and categories were created, I scrutinized the data again using the learning strategies framework developed by Danwal and Kapur (2009) in their study of young children in India to find out how students learned. The third analysis applied to the data was event mapping, a technique used to trace the origin of learned skills.During open coding, two categories emerged. The first category I named seeking help and the second category I named providing help. The properties of seeking help included: asking the whole group, asking a particular person, looking at another’s computer screen and tapping the shoulder of another. The properties of providing help included: telling others verbally, physically completing a task for someone who asked, demonstrating on the asker’s computer and demonstrating on the helper’s computer.
Learning strategies, employed by the children, were assessed using a method designed by Danwal and Kapur (2009). The learning strategies are explained below:
Learning Strategies.
Trial and Error - Children randomly perform actions on the computer and does not make a connection between their action and what happened on the computer.
Rehearsal – Children randomly perform actions on the computer but do make a connection between their actions and what happened on the computer. They repeat the action deliberately.
Self –Discovery – Children randomly perform actions on the computer but do make a connection between their actions and what happened on the computer. The child repeats the action deliberately and explores the action further in a conscious act of wanting to learn more.
Demonstration – One child shows another child how to perform an action.
Verbal Inputs – One child tells another child how to perform an action.
Observation – One child observes the actions of another child.
Practice and Drill – Children know how to perform an action on the computer and through practice repeat the action. There is a clear indication of automaticity in their actions.
The final analysis of the data is called Event Mapping, a technique applied to the field notes and the saved Scratch projects to trace the origin and proliferation of learned skills. As students created projects in Scratch, the data was dissected to determine: (1) what skills were evident in the actions of the student, (2) in what ways did the students learn these skills, (3) how were these skills passed on to other students and (4) how did the other students use these learned skills.
Establishment of Trustworthiness
In order to establish credibility, I used the following two techniques as defined by Lincoln and Guba (1985): triangulation and peer-debriefing. To establish triangulation, multiple data sources were collected, which included: field notes, saved Scratch projects (artifacts) and an interview with the children. An informal interview with the general education teacher was conducted to establish peer debriefing.
Glossary of Terms and Scratch Naming Convention
In order to understand the findings, it is important to define the nomenclature of a few words found in the Scratch application.
Sprite – a graphical character very similar to clipart
Stage – the location in the application where programmers add sprites, change backgrounds and view the actions given to the sprites with the blocks of code
Scripts Area – the section of the application where blocks of code can be customized to meet the programming needs of the user
All Scratch tools referred to in this paper regarding the Scratch application have been italicized for easy distinction.
Findings and Discussion
This section will be divided into three sections. In the first section, I will describe the methods children used when seeking help. In the second section, I will describe the learning strategies employed by the children as they learned Scratch without adult guidance. In the last section, I will analyze two Scratch projects to explain how learned skills travel from person to person and how the children constructed projects built on the ideas of others.Does gender play a role in how children seek help?
A focus group of four students was observed in this field study. Two of the students, Karen and Brad were children with special needs which required that the district provide them with Individualized Education Plans. The other two students, Julie and John, were children considered to be “at grade level” and “above grade level,” respectively. In the analysis of my data, the children sought help in two different ways: by asking others and through observation. The data revealed that girls sought help almost three times more often than the boys.
Asking Others.
Asking others was broken down into indirect asking and direct asking.
Indirect Asking. The children asked the help of others in indirect and direct ways. Indirect asking took the form of asking a question of the whole group without specifically calling on an individual. Brad was the only child to seek help using this strategy as these quotes extracted from my field notes indicate: “What do you do? How do you do this? What do I do?”
These quotes all occurred within the first 5 minutes of using Scratch for the first time, but not one after another; there was time in between each question. In between asking questions, Brad stared at his computer screen. Upon close scrutiny of the words in his questions, it is clear that the pronoun in Brad’s questions changes from you to I, as is evident in the two questions, “What do you do?” and “What do I do?” I interpret this to mean that he has internalized the problem; he is thinking about his thinking. When no one answers his first two questions, Brad uses another strategy; he asks me directly. I politely tell him that I am only observing and so he again switches strategies; he watches John’s screen and notices that John is adding sprites by clicking on the Choose new sprite from file button. Brad imitates the procedure discovered by John and his stage quickly fills with sprites. He does not resort to asking the whole group questions during any of the remaining sessions, he has learned that, at least for this group of children, asking questions of the whole group will not work.
Directly Asking Others. All of the children asked at least one question of another student or of me. Karen and Julie (27 questions) asked more than four times as many questions as Brad and John (6 questions). The person they asked depended more on who they were sitting next to and what that person was doing in Scratch rather than on gender or who they thought might know more than them. In this excerpt of my field notes, I will provide evidence to support the above claim.
Karen and John have added a sprite to their stage and are now using the paint brush in the paint editor to experiment with brush sizes. Brad is browsing for sprites to add to his stage. Julie is also in paint editor but is using the paint can to color in the cat sprite. She finishes painting the cat and asks Karen where she got the pictures. Karen points to the Choose new sprite from file button on her computer and Julie begins to browse through folders looking for a sprite.
I believe there are two reasons why students did not seek the help of a “more knowledgeable other,” (Vygotsky, 1978). The first reason is proximity and the second reason is that Scratch was learned in a setting devoid of grades. The following is an explanation of the proximity argument. Julie sat next to Karen and at the far end of the group during this session. Her desk is next to Karen’s in the classroom and when I asked her why she sat there, Julie was fully aware of why her teachers asked her and John to sit in the same row with Karen and Brad; she was there to help them. Despite knowing Karen needs a lot of help during the school day, Julie did not ignore Karen when she had a question in Scratch; she did not ask John who sat at the other end of the group. Julie asked Karen because she saw that Karen knew how to do something she wanted to do; in this case add a sprite to the stage. The placement of the computers made it easy for the children to see what was happening on the adjacent screens, but more difficult to view screens that were further away.
The other argument to support the claim that children did not seek the advice of a more knowledgeable other can be found in a comment made by Karen during a post-study interview. When asked the question: What are some of the ways you learned from your friends? Karen said,
“If there is a grown-up around and if they don’t test you on it and they see how many things you know on it, you could ask them.” It is very likely that Karen and the other students felt that there was not a “right” answer and so they felt comfortable asking the person next to them, a person, if they were learning math, might not know the anwer.
Seeking Help by Observing.
Seeking help by observing was the second most prevalent strategy used by the children in this study. Unlike Danwal and Kapur’s study (2009), where many children did not have a choice but to learn by observing because they were huddled around one or two computers, the children in this study were each provided with a laptop and chose to learn by observing. Karen and Brad were the two students who sought help using this strategy most often and used it when they were unsure of where to begin or when the work of another student caught their attention. The following two excerpts from my field notes support this claim.
John asks me where to plug the headphones into the computer, I smile and tell him that I am only observing. He quickly figures it out and begins painting the cat sprite in the paint editor. He clicks the ok button to close the window and drags a block of code on top of the cat sprite. Nothing happens so he abandons this task and clicks on the new sprite folder. Brad has been watching John's actions and imitates each action taken by John. Brad also finds out that nothing happens to the block of code when it is dropped on the stage, so he stops what he is doing and says out loud, "What do you do?"
Karen also used this strategy when beginning to learn Scratch.
Karen stared at the screen unable to remember how to open Scratch from the USB drive. As she stares at the screen she also looks at me with confused eyes. I politely tell her that I am only her to watch her, even though I can eliminate her problem in 10 seconds. She spends about a minutes watching Brad and John add sprites to their stage. Eventually Karen asks Brad for help, but his help is not successful. She asks Brad to ask John but he does not ask. She asks John directly and he comes over and opens the application for her. As soon as Scratch is open, she clicks on the Choose new sprite from file button she saw the boys using.
Once Brad had learned a skill through observation, he continued to use it throughout the sessions; the same cannot be said of Karen. When Brad’s projects were analyzed, each one had similar backgrounds, sprite choices, and placement of sprites on the stage. This is an indication that Brad was content to use what he had learned but with a different degree of sophistication each time. Karen used the self-discovery strategy more than any other child except Julie. Each of her saved projects was different and in each project, different Scratch skills were demonstrated. It is unclear to me at this time why she did not reuse many of the skills she took the time to explore.
What learning strategies do children use to learn Scratch?
The top three learning strategies used by the children are shown in Table 1.
| Table 1 | ||||
| Learning Strategies Used by Each Child | ||||
| Strategy Name |
Karen
|
Julie
|
Brad
|
John
|
| Self-Discovery |
7
|
7
|
5
|
5
|
| Observation |
4
|
3
|
5
|
1
|
| Practice and Drill |
1
|
4
|
3
|
3
|
The data from the table indicates that Self-Discovery was the number one learning strategy for three out of the four children. The saved projects did not provide sufficient evidence for these phenomena but a single quote from the post-study interview may have, once again shed some terrific insight into the thinking of the children. In order to interpret the meaning of this data, I refer once more to an answer from Karen in the post-study interview in which she said, “If there is a grown-up around and if they don’t test you on it and they see how many things you know on it, you could ask them.” Papert (1980) said, “…many children are held back in learning in which you have either “got it” or “got it wrong,” (pg. 23). The Scratch learning sessions were deliberately designed to be very low key and the software was designed to provide children with many different paths to follow depending on their learning styles (Resnick, 2007). The children were able to choose what and how much of the software they wished to learn without being afraid to fail.
When asked what they thought about Scratch, Julie said, “I think it was cool,” Karen said, “I like it,” and Brad said, “Amazing!”(John did not respond). Based on those quotes, it is safe to assume that the children enjoyed the experience and the informality of the sessions may have given them a greater sense of control over the way they wished to learn.
How is learning transferred from person to person when using Scratch?
In this section of my paper I will provide two examples that trace the origin of learned skills and demonstrate how one child’s ideas can be used and expanded upon by another child.
Building on the Foundational Skill, Adding Sprites to the Stage.
Within the first two minutes of the first session, the one and only skill used by all children every time they used Scratch was learned by John. He learned how to choose and insert sprites using the Choose new sprite from file button. In the following excerpt from my field notes, I will illustrate how this skill was first learned by John and transferred to the rest of the children in the group. This skill was always the first action taken by the kids when first starting a Scratch session.
John added a new sprite by clicking on the Choose new sprite from file button. When he did this, a window showing categories of sprites became available for him to browse through (Figure 1). He quickly found a folder that interested him, double clicked on the folder, found a trampoline sprite, clicked on it and the sprite was added to the stage. John added glasses to the cat sprite (Figure 2). Karen, unable to open Scratch because she forgot how watched John and Brad’s computer screen. Brad, was able to open Scratch but exclaimed, “How do I do this?” Through observation, Brad followed the procedure John used, which was to click on the Choose new sprite from file button and so he added a trampoline sprite to his stage and edited the stage background by using the paint editor and the paint can create color effects (Figure 3). Karen eventually asked John to help her open Scratch and he opened it for her. She quickly added a trampoline sprite to her stage in the same manner as John and Brad. She imitated John’s actions by creating the same scene on her computer, but then also added a microphone and a wig to the scene (Figure 4). As Brad looked for sprites to add to his stage, he discovered the drop down menu which helped him navigate through the folders in a different way.
It did not take John very long to click on the Choose new sprite from file button and alter this and the remaining Scratch sessions. Once John clicked on it he quickly recognized what this tool did and proceeded to add many sprites to the stage. In order for him to locate sprites, he had to navigate through a variety of folders, which is evidence of self-discovery. Self-Discovery occurs when a child randomly performs actions on the computer and then makes a connection between their actions and what happened on the computer. The child repeats the action deliberately and explores the action further in a conscious act of wanting to learn more.
Brad was the first student to follow John’s actions. This may have happened because he was sitting right next to him and Karen was sitting a couple of feet away. Brad observed John clicking on the button but he did not ask him any questions. He performed the same skill in this session and in every session afterward. Even though Brad learned how to add sprites to his stage by following John, he was the only student to browse through the folders using the drop down menus. Since Karen was unable to open Scratch, she spent the first few minutes watching Brad, who was sitting next to her. When she was finally able to open Scratch, she immediately added sprites to the stage using the same procedure. Like Brad and John, Karen practiced using this skill throughout the sessions. In summary, John learned a new skill through self-discovery and Brad and Karen learned a new skill by observing John.
Building on the Shark
In the next session, all four children continued to add sprites to their stages by clicking on the Choose new sprite from file button. In this scenario, Brad created a scene on his computer that included a number of dancing sprites and a shark “eating” a male sprite. Brad shared his screen with the other children, which inspired John to paint his own shark, learn two new Scratch tools and share his new learning with Karen. Karen used what she learned from John in her next two creations. The following is an excerpt from my expanded field notes that illustrates how a single shark led to the learning of two new Scratch skills.
In this session Brad edited the stage to create a multi-colored background. He added a number of sprites to the stage: three people, four boats, hair to the cat and a shark. The shark was open-mouthed and the open mouth has the head of a male sprite in it. As he adds the shark he says, “The shark is going to eat other sprites.” (Figure 5) John asked the other children to look at his screen and they do. Both of the other children laugh and when John returned to his computer, he opened the paint editor, painted a shark and used the Flip horizontally tool to change the direction of the shark (Figure 6). He did this repeatedly to give the shark the sense of movement. In the following session, John discovered the can rotate button located above the scripts area. As he clicked on the button he noticed the sprite on his stage had rotated. This fascinated him and he exclaimed, “Oh, my gosh!” He tried to share this new learning with Karen, but she is continued to listen to sounds, and ignored him. Later in that same session, Karen asked John to show her how to rotate sprites, but not in the way he did it. She wanted to know how to rotate the sprites in the paint editor. John demonstrated how to do this and Karen spent the rest of the session rotating sprites and adding them to her stage (Figure 7).
There are a number of Scratch skills evident in Brad’s creation. He used the Choose new sprites from file button to add sprites to his stage, he edited the background using the paint editor and he also edited a hair sprite which he added to the cat sprite. Brad first learned how to add sprites to the stage from John by observing him in the previous session. He learned how to edit the stage through the learning strategy of self-discovery. When he clicked on the edit button to edit the stage, the stage opened in the paint editor. Brad then learned how to apply fill effects with the paint can to create a “sunset” scene. He also edited the hair sprite, a skill that he learned through self-discovery in the first session. In summary, Brad used one skill he learned from John, he learned two new skills and practiced a skill that he learned in another session.
Brad invited John and Karen to look at this shark scene, but only John obliged. John laughed at the image of the shark “eating” the male sprite and decided to paint a shark in the paint editor. It is unclear how and when John learned how to paint in the paint editor (limitation of study which is elaborated upon later in this paper). While in the paint editor, John learned, through self-discovery, how to use the Flip Horizontally tool to flip the shark back and forth creating a sense of motion. In the following session, John learned, again through self-discovery, how to rotate a sprite but NOT in the paint editor. He clicked on the can rotate button above the scripts area, which caused the sprite on the stage to rotate. He tried to share this learned information with Karen, but she was not interested at that time. In summary, John practiced a skill he learned in another session and learned two new skills because of the influence of Brad’s shark scene.
Karen was not interested in John’s attempt at sharing his knowledge of the can rotate tool, but later asked him to teach her how to rotate sprites in the paint editor. After he demonstrated how to rotate the sprites, Karen practiced this skill for the remaining session. In the next session her “falling letters” project used this skill and also spawned new learning for John and Julie. In summary, Karen learned, through demonstration, a new skill that she used in two projects.
Summary of Findings
Children in this study sought help in two ways: by asking others and through observation. Asking others was broken into two categories, indirect asking and direct asking. Indirect asking was only used by one child, Brad, without much success. All of the students used the direct asking strategy, with the girls asking four times the amount of questions as they boys. Three main learning strategies were used by the children, with self-discovery being the most used strategy. Learned skills can be traced back to their origin using a technique called event mapping. Children were able to build on the ideas of other children which led to more learned skills.
Conclusion
Dangwal and Kapur (2009) found the learning strategy of practice and drill to be the most prominent individual learning strategy. I found that self-discovery was the preferred strategy and I attribute that to a lack of time to explore the software. The Scratch program is incredibly feature-rich. Although I did not present the data in this paper, I have collected data on the rest of the students in this classroom. When one explores that data, one finds many skills were learned by other students that were not explored by my focus group. As I continue my research with this group of students and they learn how to save projects, I suspect that they will practice skills they have learned instead of their continued exploration. Danwal and Kapur noticed that as students became more aware of their actions on the computer, they used practice and drill instead of self-discovery.
There is clear evidence that the children “built knowledge” upon the ideas of their peers. However, they did not build knowledge as defined by Scardamalia and Bereiter (2007). These two researchers define knowledge building as the modification or creation of public knowledge, the knowledge of the “real world”. This did not occur through any fault of the children’s, it occurred because I did not set up an account on the Scratch website that would enable them to share their work with the world. Sharing alone will not build knowledge, in this sense, so students will still need to recognize when new knowledge has been created by evaluating all the knowledge available to them on the Scratch website. At last check, there were over 700,000 projects available for download, so I wonder if it possible for them to “build knowledge.”
Implications
Scratch as Podcasting Tool
John and Brad experimented with the recording feature of Scratch. Scratch enables users to record audio with the very easy to use audio recorder. The audio recorder does not provide students with the ability to edit the audio, like Garageband or Audacity, but if teachers are looking for a simple recording interface, this is it. Teachers or students can create a free account on the Scratch website and any projects that contain audio files can be uploaded and shared with the world in seconds.
Scratch as Teaching Tool
If a teacher told her students to construct a square using a Scratch sprite and block code, the children would actively construct their knowledge of a square instead of looking at one in a book or on a worksheet (Mitra, 2000). Papert (1980) wrote about the potential influence of the computer as an “object-to-think-with” (pg.23). In this square example, students can think with the computer and actively build a square as long as they know that all the sides of a square must be of equal length. They must also understand that each angle of a square must be 90 degrees. Most students are required to recognize a square, which is at the Knowledge of Bloom’s Taxonomy instead of construct a square, which is at the Synthesis level of this taxonomy. If the students share their squares, they can assess each other’s work, which is at the highest level of the taxonomy. Why should students stop at Knowledge when they can Evaluate.
Scratch the Imagination Tool
Mitchel Resnick (2007) one of the creators of Scratch wrote, “Our goal is to provide tools that can be used in multiple ways, leaving more room for children’s imaginations,” (pg. 2). The students in this study spent every second of their 20 minutes engaged with the software. It is highly motivational, feature-rich, portable, and extremely powerful. If we let children and teachers imagine, create, program, share and build on other ideas, the results will be rewarding.
Future Research
The first research opportunity is to continue studying the four children in this classroom over a longer period of time, to improve credibility (Lincoln and Guba, 1995). An effort should also be made to add Camtasia Studio, screen recording software, to the computers to improve the amount of data collected so that a more thorough micro-analysis can take place.
The second opportunity is based on an article written by Scardamalia and Bereiter (1994); the researchers suggest that children should contribute their work to a central database so that knowledge can flow freely between children. Two research questions could then be asked: In what ways does a shared directory of Scratch projects affect the new projects children produce? How do children prefer to learn new Scratch skills when provided with the means to view, download and experiment with other projects? Could a new learning strategy be established called reverse-engineering? In reverse-engineering, students open a peer’s project and then proceed to examine the code structure to learn how the blocks of code affect the sprites on the stage.
The third opportunity is related to the opening paragraph of this paper and to the Hole-in-the-Wall studies. Teachers are overwhelmed with the speed of technological changes and many have not mastered the basic computer applications such as: word processing, presentations, concept mapping, internet browsing etc. I believe that the methodology of this study could be used to study how children learn other computer applications.
Two final questions have also emerged as a result of my work and they are: (1) Does knowledge building increase when children share their work on the Internet via the Scratch web site? (2) In what ways can children create projects using Scratch for other content areas?
Limitations of the Study
There were a number of challenges that could be improved upon in this study. While in the field, it was not possible to record all the actions taken by the students. My field notes were used to capture as much of the actions and interactions of the students as I could. In the first session I attempted to video the children, but because of the nature of the placement of the laptops, the children’s bodies blocked the camera’s view. In future studies, it will be necessary to secure funding to purchase Camtasia’s Studio, a screen recording software application. This will provide me with the ability to track every mouse click taken by each student. I will then be able to use a video camera to record student interactions.The use of flexible groups and learning centers was a significant factor in my having the ability to conduct this field study. In most classrooms, in the school district where I conducted my research, learning centers are not used by the teachers. Unless a teacher is willing to give up 20 minutes of their day, it will be necessary to work with teachers who utilize learning centers.
In order to firmly establish credibility in qualitative research, a researcher must remain in the field for a considerable amount of time, something Lincoln and Guba (1985) call prolonged engagement. The observations conducted for this study were completed in a three week period; therefore more time in the field will improve the credibility of this study.
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