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Computer programming as an educational tool in the English classroom: a

preliminary study

Conference Paper · March 2015

DOI: 10.1109/EDUCON.2015.7096089

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 Computer programming as an educational tool in
the English classroom
A preliminary study

J. Moreno-León Gregorio Robles

Programamos.es GSyC/LibreSoft
Sevilla, Spain Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
[email protected] Madrid, Spain
[email protected]

Abstract—Computational thinking, a problem solving method programming is already part of the national curriculum in nine
that uses computer science techniques, has recently become countries: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Greece,
mainstream as many governments and major Internet companies Ireland, Poland, Portugal and the UK (England) [5]. But not
are promoting programming skills among children. However, only governments have joined this movement, as industry
little is known about how programming affects other aspects of leaders have launched various programs to promote the
life beyond the acquired programming skills. In this regard, this teaching of computer programming and the development of
paper summarizes the work done in the school San Diego and computational thinking among children, youth and adults.
San Vicente (Madrid, Spain) during the third quarter of the year Google, for instance, tries to increase student exposure to
2013/2014, where we conducted a study with four groups of computer science in school, after school, and with summer
students in 4th and 5th grade to measure to what extent the use programs with its CS First1 initiative, whereas Mozilla, as part
of computer programming in English classes can be an
of its Webmaker campaign, promotes coding with Appmaker2,
interesting educational tool with a positive impact on the learning
otucome of the students. The results show that the groups
a web tool to easily develop application for mobile devices.
working with programming activities improved more than the According to the operational definition of computational
groups using traditional resources. Moreover, when asked via thinking developed by the International Society for Technology
surveys at the end of the study, most students felt that coding was in Education and the Computer Science Teachers Association
a positive influence, not only for learning English, but for [6], one of the basics of this process is “generalizing and
developing other important skills as teamwork and learning to transferring this problem solving process to a wide variety of
learn.
problems” (p. 9). Hence, the general research question of this
paper is in how far computational thinking affects other
Keywords—computer programming; coding; English; curricular activities. In particular, this work was designed to
educational tool; computational thinking; technology- test whether the use of computer programming in English
enhanced learning classes can be beneficial, not only regarding the computer or
Disclaimer technology skills that students would acquire, but because this
educational tool could have a positive impact on learning
This document is a draft. The published paper can be outcomes of students in relation to their English language
accessed at IEEExplore. skills. Therefore, the specific questions we want to give an
answer to in this research paper are following:
I. Introduction
The modification of computer science teaching in K-12
 Does the use of programming in English classes
improve the academic outcomes for students?
education to include the development of computational
thinking is one of the latest trends in the educational landscape  Does the use of programming in English classes
[1]. In Wing’s words [2], computational thinking “involves increase student motivation in this subject?
solving problems, designing systems, and understanding
human behaviour, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to II. Background
computer science” (p. 33).
A. Computer programming as an educational tool.
Moreover, taking into account estimates from the European Scratch.
Commission, by 2020 there will be a shortfall of 900,000 The use of computer programming in schools as an
workers with a good digital competence and computer educational tool to enhance learning in other disciplines is
programming skills [3] and other similar estimations exist in increasingly common in all levels of education in many
the US as well [4]. In the last years several governments countries [7,8,9]. With this goal in mind several languages and
around the world have begun to modify the curricula in schools
to promote the development of computational thinking of 1
primary and secondary students through computer http://www.cs-first.com/
2
programming or coding. Thus, in Europe computer https://apps.webmaker.org/
programming environments have been designed to enable 14 countries attending the last year of compulsory secondary
children from 6 or 7 years onwards to learn to program and education. This study provides the percentage of students that
build different types of interactive applications, animations and reach the levels in the Common European Framework of
video games. The most successful educational programming Reference for Languages, focusing on a range from A1 to B2.
language nowadays is Scratch [10], a programming platform The percentage of Spanish students in the B English level, the
that includes a development environment and a website where highest one, was between 24% and 30%, percentages far from
the community can host their projects, run, study and reuse the 50% which is originally proposed by the European
other programs, and share ideas or suggestions with other Commission as a target reference point for European Indicator
programmers. The Scratch usage statistics3 leave no doubt
of Language Competence.
regarding the global nature of this movement, with more than
3,500,000 users and more than 6,000,000 shared projects on III. Methodology
the web. Fig. 1 provides a screenshot of a Scratch project
hosted in the Scratch web platform. For this study we have worked with two groups of 4th
grade students (9 and 10 years old) and two groups of 5th grade
students (10 and 11 years old) formed by pupils of similar
characteristics with regard to age, number of students,
academic result, gender distribution and English subject
grades.
In each of the levels 4th and 5th, we have worked with a
control group and an experimental group. In 4th grade, the
experimental group consisted of 13 students, while the control
group was comprised of 15 students. In 5th grade, the
experimental group consisted of 19 students, while the control
group was formed by 18 students.
The study was divided into the following phases:
1. Initial training of English teachers participating in the
study.
2. Initial questionnaires, to measure both English skills
and several aspects of motivation.
3. Classroom work of English teachers with students.
The experimental groups included some programming
activities, trying to work the vocabulary and grammar
of the unit by developing different projects with
Example screenshot of a Scratch project. On the right, the
Fig. 1. Scratch. The control group worked this unit in a
visual elements used to program in the Scratch environment. traditional way, using the same type of activities that
On the left, the resulting program (above) and the sprites had been used to date.
(images used in the program) (below). 4. Final questionnaires, to measure both the English
One use that is being given to this tool, in addition to skills and several aspects of motivation.
videogames programming, is to create interactive scenarios to
narrate stories and bring characters to life following a storyline.
A. Initial training of teachers
An example of the educational use of programming to enhance
the development of other skills is the research performed by None of the two teachers who participated in the study had
Burke and Kafai [11], runnig a writing workshop in which prior experience with Scratch, so a training course was planned
students had to create stories using Scratch instead of with to provide these teachers with the necessary rudiments to cope
pencil and paper. Both students and researchers concluded that with the environment, know the basic features and discover the
these experiences had been very motivating and positive, not type of activities that could be developed with their students in
only to develop digital literacy, but also to improve the learning the classroom. Although an 8 hour course was proposed, due to
of linguistic content. the workload of teachers only three hours of instruction were
B. English language skills of Spanish students given. One of the teachers had previous experience with
programming computers, having a college degree in web
Regarding the English language skills of Spanish students, application development, and, obviously, during the training
the results in international tests show that there is still much sessions he showed a bigger improvement than his peer.
room for improvement to achieve the objectives set by the
European Commission. The last study in Europe, European B. Initial questionnaires
Survey on Language Competences, secondary research [12], Before the study, students filled out an initial questionnaire
assessed the English language skills of 53,000 students from to measure the knowledge they had of the contents of the
following English unit. In addition, students filled out a
questionnaire intended to collect other type of information as
3
http://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/
gender, age, Internet access and use of electronic devices at final tests, is 2.65 points, while the improvement of the
home, ability to perform different types of activities with students in the control groups is 2.42; that is, a difference of
computing devices, wish to continue their studies and 0.23 points.
subsequent career in the computer field. However, if the results obtained by each of the groups are
C. Classroom work individually analysed, as shown in Table I, more significant
differences are observed, although the number of students is
The work of the unit was divided into 12 sessions in which
not enough to draw final conclusions. Particularly striking is
in the experimental groups some programming activities with
the improvement obtained by the 4th grade experimental
Scratch were interspersed, while the control group continued to
group, 3.93 points, which is precisely the one that worked with
work the same way as they had done in the rest of the course.
the teacher who had prior coding experience and who
Thus, the work with one of the experimental groups consisted
progressed the most during the teachers' training sessions.
of the following sessions:
These results appear to be consistent with the findings of other
1. Introduction of the vocabulary of the unit. Session held studies [8] indicating that good trained teachers are essential to
in the classroom. optimize students learning and obtain the expected goals.
2. Introduction of the basic concepts and use of Scratch TABLE 1. Initial and Final scores by group.
making a simple example using the computer and
projector in the classroom.
4th EG 4th CG 5th EG 5th CG
3. Reading the story of the unit and conduct of questions
related to text.
4. First session in the computer room. Creation of user Initial test 2.80 4.00 7.30 6.26
accounts; students log in and out of the website to get
used to the interface. Final test 6.73 6.85 8.66 8.25
5. Second session in the computer lab. Children create an
animated cartoon with Scratch; the character had to Improvement 3.93 2.85 1.36 1.99
explain a recipe indicating the required ingredients.
6. Session in the classroom.
B. Surveys
7. Third session in the computer lab. Students had to
finish the recipe and add their projects to the Scratch The survey results can be used to obtain very interesting
study created for the class. conclusions. According to the collected answers, all students
enjoyed the classes in which they worked with Scratch, as
8. Vocabulary and grammar exercises. shown in Fig. 2. Moreover, regarding the type of skills that are
9. Fourth session in the computer lab. Exhibition of the developed while learning to program, almost all students felt
work to their peers. that the use of Scratch had helped them to learn to work in
teams (Fig. 3), and 75% of them believe that working with this
10. Fifth session in the computer lab. Students had to write tool encouraged them to learn on their own looking for
a conversation between two characters talking about a information on the Internet (Fig. 4).
recipe.
11. Sixth session in the computer lab. After correcting
essays, students used them to program a second
animation with Scratch.
12. Exam of the unit.
D. Final questionnaire
All students filled out the same test they took at the
beginning of the unit to check the degree of improvement
during the sessions. They also filled a questionnaire to identify
issues related to motivation and interest in the subject that
programming could have awakened. I have enjoyed the classes in which we worked with
Fig. 2.
Scratch.
IV. Results
A. Tests scores
With regard to improving the educational outcomes of
students participating in the study, the results are not totally
conclusive. The improvement obtained by the students in the
experimental groups, comparing the results of the initial and
 a static analyser of Scratch projects inspired by Lint 5 that tries
to detect programming errors in Scratch programs. Hence, our
plug-in automates the recognition of the degree of development
of different aspects of computational thinking, specifically on:
 Abstraction and modularization
 Parallelism
 Synchronization
 Logical thinking
Fig. 3. Working with Scratch helped me to learn to teamwork.  Flow control
 User interactivity
 Data representation
Analysing the blocks used in a Scratch project, a score
between 0 and 3 points is assigned to each of these aspects,
depending on whether this capacity is not worked, a basic
operation has been demonstrated, the skill is in development or
a professional skill has been proved. By summing the scores
for each of the capabilities overall mastery score, between 0
and 21 points, is obtained.
Working with Scratch encouraged me to learn by myself
Fig. 4. This plug-in has been included in the alpha version of the
searching information on the Internet. Dr. Scratch tool [14], offering the Scratch community the
opportunity to automatically assess the correctness and mastery
of their projects using this web application6.
If we focus on the English subject, all students indicated that
working with Scratch helped them learning more (Fig. 5), Studying the average scores of the 4th and 5th grade
although the fact that the teachers decided to work with the projects, a significant difference is observed: 6.88 points for
program interface in this language may have influenced the 4th, which is considered a basic mastery degree, and 8.30
responses. points for 5th, which represents a mastery degree in
development. If the differences in each of the aspects are
analysed, as can be seen in Fig. 7, the two capabilities with
bigger differences are parallelism and synchronization. These
results indicate that these more sophisticated skills are
developed with maturity, which is in line with other studies
that model the progression of the development of
computational thinking in primary students [15].

Fig. 5. Working with Scratch helped me to learn more English.

Finally, with regard to the motivation of the students in the

English subject, the raise of the motivation is made evident in
Fig. 6 and Fig. 7, as a vast majority of the students state that the
use of Scratch encouraged them to learn more English and
made them realize that English is really important for being
Fig. 6.Working with Scratch encouraged me to learn more
able to learn by themselves by searching information on the
English.
Internet.
C. Source code analysis
In order to measure the development of computational
thinking of students, we developed a plug-in4 for Hairball [13],
5
http://www.unix.com/man-page/FreeBSD/1/lint
4 6
https://github.com/jemole/hairball/blob/master/hairball/plugins/mastery.py http://drscratch.programamos.es
 was a positive influence, not only for learning English, but for
developing other important skills as teamwork and learning to
learn. We also have evidence that the programming skills of
the teacher influence the learning outcome of students.
However, all our results are -due to the limited scope of our
experiment- not statistically significative. Future work should
expand the number of students, the working time of
programming, which in this study was limited to one unit, and
the type of subjects in which programming will be included.
Hence, we might be able to conclude to what extent the
After working with Scratch I think that English is really
Fig. 7. development of computational thinking promotes the learning
important if I want to learn by myself on the Internet. of other skills and whether students are able to generalize and
transfer this problem solving process to other areas and
As shown in Fig. 8, the logical thinking was not trained by disciplines.
neither of the groups. Taking into account the kind of projects
developed by the students, which were storytelling projects, Acknowledgments
our results confirm other studies [16] that state that this kind of The work of Jesús Moreno-León and Gregorio Robles has
projects use less if statements than games or music videos, for been funded in part by the Region of Madrid under project
instance, as stories have a linear structure in which the “eMadrid - Investigación y Desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-
possibilities of creating branches provided by if statements learning en la Comunidad de Madrid'' (S2013/ICE-2715). The
seems to be less useful. authors are very thankful to the teachers and pupils of the San
Diego and San Vicente School in Madrid.
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