Developing Mathematical Thinking with Scratch An Experiment with 6th Grade Students
Luis Alberto Calao, Jesús Moreno-León, Heidy Ester Correa, Gregório Robles · 2015
One of the latest trends in the educational landscape is the introduction of computer programming in the K-12 classroom to develop computational thinking in students. As computational thinking is not a skill exclusively related to computer science, it is assumed - but not yet scientifically proven - that the problem solving process may be general- ized and transferred to a wide variety of problems. This paper presents a research designed to test whether the use of coding in Maths classes could have a positive impact on learning outcomes of students in their mathematical skills. Therefore, the questions we want to investigate in this paper are if the use of programming in Maths classes improves (a) modeling process and reality phenomena, (b) reasoning, (c) prob- lem formulation and problem solving, and (d) comparison and execution of procedures and algorithms. We have therefore designed a quantita- tive, quasi-experimental experiment with 42 participating 6th grade (11 and 12 years old) students. Results show that there is a statistically sig- nificant increase in the understanding of mathematical processes in the experimental group, which received training in Scratch.