Pre-service Teachers’ Conceptions and Reflections of Computer Programming using Scratch: Technological and Pedagogical Perspectives

Abstract

This paper presents a case of a computer programming course with a new approach for Korean pre-service teachers. Computer programming is generally considered hard to master and unproductive due to dealing with syntactical errors. As an alternative approach, Scratch was incorporated into a programming course for pre-service teachers. Scratch is an educational programming language developed by the MIT Media Lab to help beginners approach programming through drag-and-drop coding blocks and remixing various media such as images, sounds, texts or narrations. This study aims to discover how Scratch changes Korean pre-service teachers’ perspectives toward computer programming and also what their artifacts reveal. The data for analysis includes surveys and reflections from 96 pre-service teachers who took the programming course in the spring semester at a national university of education in Korea. In addition, the digital learning content created by each group was collected and analyzed. The research results present pre-service teachers’ conceptions and reflections of computer programming and their intentions to use it in their future teaching. From the collected artifacts, the types of digital content and the expected learning effects of teaching content were examined. This paper discusses the implications of the research findings for teacher education programs as well as pre-service teachers’ adaptive expertise for 21st century learning environments.