Introducing Teachers to Engineering Practices with ScratchJr: Programming Patterns and Documentation Guidelines

One of the main problems for introducing informatics into the school curriculum is the lack of trained teachers. In particular, teacher development in programming cannot merely rely on memorizing or intuition. However, there hardly exist educational materials aimed at promoting deep learning of block-based programming. Furthermore, schoolteachers usually are not highly motivated to learn programming. We introduce two engineering practices aimed at schoolteachers' development in the ScratchJr programming language. Firstly, we present a collection of ten programming patterns. They are classified into three categories: visual effects, movement patterns and control patterns. The two former categories deal with multimedia actions while the third category deals with the control of program flow. Secondly, we present guidelines to document ScratchJr programs. The guidelines were inspired by the Block Model of program comprehension but are adapted to the structure of ScratchJr programs by redefining the Block Model matrix as a documentation matrix. In addition, an evaluation of teachers' use of both materials was conducted. About three quarters of the teachers used the patterns, and almost all teachers successfully applied the guidelines. However, teachers' use of some cells of the documentation matrix was dispar. Therefore, some parts of the documentation guidelines were revised, and a final version was elaborated.