Informatics in Education

The paper discusses an alternative method of assessing the difficulty of pupils’ programming tasks to determine their age appropriateness. Building a program takes the form of its successive iterations. Thus, it is possible to monitor the number of times such a program was built by the solver. The variance of the number of program builds can be considered as a criterion of the difficulty of the task. We seek to verify whether this variance is the greatest in the age group for which the task is most suitable. We created several series of programming tasks and offered them to 87000 pupils from 4th to 13th grade. For each task, we compared the optimal age group determined by the variance of the number of program builds method with the group determined by the correct answer ratio method. A strong correlation was observed in traditional microworlds Karel the Robot and Turtle. A moderate correlation was achieved in the new microworld Movie.

Computational thinking (CT) has been introduced in primary schools worldwide. However, rich classroom-based evidence and research on how to assess and support students’ CT through programming are particularly scarce. This empirical study investigates 4th grade students’ (N = 57) CT in a comparatively comprehensive and fine-grained manner by assessing their Scratch projects (N = 325) with a framework that was revised from previous studies to aim towards enhancing CT. The results demonstrate in detail the various coding patterns and code constructs the students programmed in assorted projects throughout a programming course and the extent to which they had conceptual encounters with CT. Notably, the projects indicated CT diversely, and the students altogether encountered dissimilar areas in CT. To target the acquisition of CT broadly, manifold programming activities are necessary to introduce in the classroom. Furthermore, we discuss the possibilities of applying the assessment framework employed herein to support CT education through Scratch in classrooms.

Despite a growing effort to implement computational thinking (CT) skills in primary schools, little research is reported about what CT skills to teach at what age. Therefore, the research questions that guide this study read: (1) How is age related to students' success in computational thinking tasks? (2) How are computational thinking tasks perceived by students? (3) How do students' experience learning with respect to computational thinking? 200 primary school students between the age of 6 and 12 participated in this study. These students got introduced to two CT subjects: abstraction and decomposition. We found that age seems to be related with these concepts, with an interaction effect for gender in the abstraction task. No differences found between young and older students in the constructs perceived difficulty, cognitive load, and flow indicate that young primary school students can engage in learning these CT skills.

On the basis of national research data on schoolchildren' achievements, the article deals with implementation of educational software in the process of teaching world study in primary school and different natural sciences in basic school. It has been established that educational software is often enough implemented during the classes on world study in primary school in comparison with natural science lessons provided in basic school. Primary educational software is regularly used in the city site, less frequently - in the regional centre and rarely in the rural area schools. On the opposite of the city site schools, basic educational software is widely employed in the rural area. The comparison of the rates of implementation of educational software during the different classes on natural sciences reveals that educational software is most frequently applied during the classes on biology, the least frequently - during the classes on physics.