Computer science in middle schools
Leading team
Project members
- Dr. Orni Meerbaum-Salant
- Fatima Kaloti-Hallak
Summary
At the center of this project stands a textbook for teaching computer science ideas and concepts using the Scratch environment. This book is intended for middle schools. Using this book to teach computer science in middle school was studied from different angles: We showed that that middle-school students can learn ideas and concepts of computer science; we studied the effects of learning computer science in middle school on students’ learning of computer science in high school; and we described programming habits in Scratch that emerged from students’ outcomes.
Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab.
Project website
Links for further reading
- Armoni, M., & Ben-Ari, M. (2010). Computer Science Concepts in Scratch. Rehovot, Israel: Weizmann Institute of Science.
- Meerbaum-Salant, O., Armoni, M., & Ben-Ari, M. (2010). Learning computer science concepts with Scratch. In M. E. Caspersen, M. Clancy, & K. Sanders (Eds.), Proceedings of the sixth International Workshop on Computing Education Research (ICER10, Aaarhus, Denmark) (pp. 69-76)
- Meerbaum-Salant, O., Armoni, M., & Ben-Ari, M. (2011). Habits of programming in Scratch. In G. Rößling, T. Naps, & C. Spannagel (Eds), Proceedings of the 16th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, (ITiCSE11, Darmstadt, Germany) (pp. 168-172).
- Gordon, M., Marron, A., & Meerbaum-Salant O. (2012). Spaghetti for the main course?: observations on the naturalness of scenario-based programming. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE’12), Haifa, Israel, 198-203.
- Meerbaum-Salant, O., Armoni, M., & Ben-Ari, M. (2013). Learning Computer Science Concepts with Scratch. Computer Science Education, 23(3), 239-264.
- Armoni, M., Meerbaum-Salant, O., & Ben-Ari, M. (2015). From Scratch to “Real” Programming. ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 14(4), 25:1-15.