An Analysis of Pre-service Teachers' Learning Process in Programming Learning

Abstract

As the importance of computing technology increases, computer science education is being actively implemented around the world. Because computer science education is being introduced into the curriculum, research on how to effectively teach programming (which is the core of automation) is actively underway. Although the importance of block-based programming languages has increased, most studies have focused on text-based programming languages. As interest in programming increases, block-based programming languages will be taught to a variety of audiences. Therefore, this study analyzed Code.org, which provides a development environment for block-based programming; this study then investigated the programming learning process of pre-service teachers, who used Code.org. Sixteen pre-service teachers participated in the study, and their learning processes were uncovered by analyzing their programming results. This suggests that pre-service teachers can learn sequential and necessary repetition without difficulty. However, the pre-service teachers failed to use the repetition block through abstraction. Besides, for While and Until, pre-service teachers did not understand the concept of repeating according to the condition. For Counter, pre-service teachers had difficulty repeating the use of variables. In the condition, pre-service teachers were not able to separate the command, which should be executed when the condition is True and when it is False. For Event, pre-service teachers had no problem utilizing the function, but they were not able to call the function with a parameter. Based on this, it was confirmed that a pre-service teacher can understand the principle of programming development in advance by understanding the abstraction, condition, and variable in the loop statement. In this study, there was a limit to practicing block-based programming language due to the platform’s low scalability. Future research should solve these problems and diversify the research subjects.