«The Scratch repository: new research opportunities and its impact in education»
Jesús Moreno LeónProgramamos
Abstract
Just as many researchers use GitHub as a basis for their software evolution research, it is possible to take advantage of the Scratch project repository, which contains more than 17 million creations developed by children and young people around the world, to find out more about their learning process. This presentation will show the latest research from the KGBL3 research group at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, in which data from this repository are used to study the relationships between levels of participation in the community and improvement in programming skills, as well as to propose a learning path that makes use of different types of projects to develop specific aspects of computational thinking. The talk will conclude with a discussion on the implications of these investigations for both educators and policy makers.
Bio
After more than a decade as a secondary and vocational training teacher, and after his work as a technical advisor at the National Institute for Educational Technologies and Teacher Training, Jesús is focused on research and promotion of computational thinking from early ages. To this end, he combines his work leading Programamos, a non-profit organization, and the work for his doctoral thesis with the KGBL3 group at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.
