Codecraft Competition: Learning to Code Through Contests Using Scratch

Abstract

In this article, the design principles that guided the development of the Codecraft competition are discussed together with strategies for making the contest engaging for everyone. A random selection of 30 educators and 30 students who participated in the contests were also interviewed to find out their views about the competition and its impact on their computational thinking and creativity skills. Furthermore, 85 projects made up of codes from the Scratch program and submitted during the final round of the contest during the years 2016 to 2018 were processed using an online analytical tool known as Dr Scratch. To identify the progress made by the students, the different computational thinking concepts were analysed more deeply. The study revealed that over three years of the Codecraft competition, there was a significant improvement regarding the use of programming concepts, logic, and computational practices. Moreover, the average computational thinking (CT) score of the projects increased from 11.8 in 2016 to 14.2 in 2017 and 16.0 in 2018. Learning of computational concepts through an active contestbased approach also highlighted several advantages, such as motivation, fun, commitment, and enthusiasm, showing improvements related to creativity, computational thinking, and computational practices.