Contextualized Spiral Learning of Computer Programming in Brazilian Vocational Secondary Education

Abstract

This innovative practice full paper presents an experience report of an approach carried out with students of a vocational secondary program in Informatics, in an introductory course on Computer Programming. In Brazil, in addition to the undergraduate education, an important part of professional education is based on technical vocational secondary programs, geared towards faster training and practice. In information technology (IT) vocational programs, high levels of dropout and failure are frequent. Much of this failure happens in computer programming courses. Various factors contribute to the lack of student motivation and, thus, to the high professional deficit in the field of IT. This work presents an experience report of an approach used with students of a technical vocational IT program. The approach is based on activity contextualization, environments for novices and a spiral learning approach. The experience was split into three contextualized blocks: Figures, Games and Images. In each block, concepts are (re)introduced and deepened in a spiral way. Lessons learned suggest that: context change impacts student motivation, the approach is partially adequate to the audience, the Scratch tool contributes to learning programming concepts, and appropriate tools help transitioning between block-based and text-based programming languages.