Reflections on a Scratch summer course: students' perspectives

Abstract

The GENIOS Portugal project has been offering Scratch programming courses, with a 15-hour duration, in face-to-face mode, to groups of students and two or more teachers of each class, from schools that are project members. Two Scratch teachers per class, hired by the project, have also participated in 12 of these 15 hours, supporting the activities. When the schools’ face-to-face activities stopped, in January 2021, a 12-hour Scratch course was tested. This course was then replicated eleven times, between July and August 2021, involving 132 students. In this paper, we will use a qualitative methodology to analyse the perceptions of the students involved about the course they had the opportunity to participate. We will also look at the teachers' evaluation of their final work, carried out in groups, to try to understand if a methodology, totally based on online training, can have satisfactory results with students attending the 5th and 6th grade. The results achieved point out to the success of the courses, having obtained very positive opinions from the students who attended it and most of the final works, done by the students, have been classified above average, when comparing them with all those that were carried out throughout the GENIOS project.