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Abstract

A current ongoing process in many countries today is to implement programming in K-12 education. With this comes challenges for the involved teachers on how to best teach and integrate programming?in their?subjects.?On the other hand, the introduction of programming could?also open opportunities?for?programming?as?a new and improved way of learning and understanding?technology and mathematics. For Swedish?K-12?teachers this?should?be?rapidly?implemented,?but without any concrete guidelines for how or for which tools to use. The aim of this study was to explore teachers perceptions of learning and integrating programming?in technology and mathematics,?and their preferences of programming tools.

The overall research strategy was a case study approach, with two instances of a programming course as the case study units. In both course instances the main choice has been between block programming with Scratch,?and textual programming with Python. Data was collected in a combination of submitted essays, programming assignments and workshop observations. Findings from?a?content analysis of the submitted essays have been compared to workshop observations,?and?to?the analysis of programming assignments.

Results suggests that?the?main challenge in learning and integrating programming is the perceived time trouble.?In?parallel,?many teachers highlight the potential?benefits?of renewing their teaching and learning sessions with programming-based problem solving. Considering the choice between block programming and textual programming several teachers brings up the idea of combining the two rather than excluding one of them. Furthermore, there seems to be minor differences in the preferences of programming tools between teachers with different subjects and?different?age groups?of?students. Finally, the most positive finding is the improved self confidence that many teachers show, when?their own ability to manage programming in their classrooms?increase?after learning the fundamentals of programming.?

Projects

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