Effective Feedback on Elementary School Scratch Programs

Abstract

1 MOTIVATION Teachers are faced with many challenges when teaching programming in school such as helping students with their programming problems and assessing students [12, 15, 17]. Both activities lead to teachers giving feedback to their students. However, powerful feedback has to fulfill certain criteria and must use appropriate strategies [4, 10]. An even more basic requirement is that the teacher has to know the solution and preferably also has a deeper understanding of the underlying concepts. However, many teachers consider their lack of subject knowledge a main challenge when teaching programming and elementary school teachers mentioned it even more often than secondary school teachers [12]. As programming is increasingly introduced at elementary schools, the question of how to support elementary school teachers with giving feedback arises. Automated code analysis tools might provide an opportunity as they give information that can be used to give appropriate feedback to the students. These tools address different aspects of programming and exist for different programming languages. When programming in elementary schools, block-based programming languages are of interest because they can reduce the complexity compared to text-based programming languages. We focus on Scratch which is one of the most frequently studied programming languages in the K-12 context [7]. However, automated analysis tools for Scratch also involve challenges. They contain technical terms and often require a deeper understanding of programming concepts. Thus, elementary school teachers have to adapt the provided information to pass it on to their students. As the teachers