An Analysis of a Media-Based Approach to Teach Programming to Middle School Students
Luis Gustavo de Jesus Araujo, Roberto A. Bittencourt, David Moisés Barreto dos Santos · 2018
Previous studies have presented approaches to teach programming based on contexts close to students, such as games, robotics, and media. Those contexts may turn learning easier and more motivating. Media manipulation is one of such contexts relevant to teenage students, for their thorough use of image applications and social networks. In this work, we design and evaluate a spiral approach to teach programming to ninth-grade students of a middle school in Brazil's countryside. The approach is contextualized by media, i.e., image creation and manipulation, and we use the Python language with turtle graphics and JES tools to support it. Results point out to the influence of context and tools on learning, significant changes of perception about computing, high motivation to learn how to code, as well as a positive correlation between learning and motivation.