Abstract
This paper reports the results of an investigation involving almost a thousand primary school teachers in Italy, to explore their views on the terms “coding” and “programming”, and how they are related to their ideas on “computational thinking”.
When directly asked “if coding is different from writing programs”, roughly 2 out of 3 teachers answered “no”. Among the teachers who answered “yes”, almost 160 tried to motivate the difference: a few of them gave admissible explanations, while the others showed various misunderstandings, which we classify and discuss.
By contrast, when asked about their idea of “what coding is”, only 4 out of 10 of the teachers explicitly linked coding to programming, but an additional 2 out of 10 cited an information processing agent executing instructions. The remaining part of the sample did not provide explicit or implicit links between coding and programming.
Our investigation shows that untrained teachers hold misconceptions regarding CS and its related terms. Given the general public and media attention on “coding” in schools, currently taught by existing teachers - mostly not appropriately trained, professional development actions focusing on CS scientific principles and methods are therefore a top priority for the effectiveness of CS education in schools.
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Notes
- 1.
For example in primary schools teachers meet weekly to do an “hour of programming”, namely to agree on the content of lessons of the week.
- 2.
In [6] a value of at least 6 characterizes an “acceptable” CT definition.
- 3.
This is the subset of Q1 answers that has not been classified in any of the related categories.
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Acknowledgements
We greatly thank teachers and students involved in Programma il Futuro project (coordinated by EN) and Code.org for their cooperation.
We acknowledge the financial support of Engineering, TIM; CA Technologies, De Agostini Scuola, SeeWeb. Other companies have financially supported the project for two school-years only: Samsung Italia; Microsoft Italia; Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Facebook.
Rai Cultura, the culture department of Italian national public broadcasting company, is a media partner of the project since February 2017.
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Appendix
Appendix
Growth of search hits for terms coding and programming in ACM SIGCSE publications. Source: ACM Digital Library search results (Aug. 7th, 2018).
Frequency of each category in Q1
Frequency of each category in Q3
Distribution of Q3 answers among classes.
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Corradini, I., Lodi, M., Nardelli, E. (2018). An Investigation of Italian Primary School Teachers’ View on Coding and Programming. In: Pozdniakov, S., Dagienė, V. (eds) Informatics in Schools. Fundamentals of Computer Science and Software Engineering. ISSEP 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11169. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02750-6_18
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