Program, learn and play: A course of extracurricular activities in scratch programming for students in grades 3-6

Abstract

Informatics is one of the academic subjects, the expediency of studying which amid digital transformation of many spheres of our life is beyond doubt. Informatics in Russian schools is studied on a compulsory basis in grades 7-9 (13-15 years), but at the choice of educational participants, it can be started in elementary school. Russian informatics textbooks for elementary school are predominantly theoretical in nature. However, junior schoolchildren expect more practical work on the computer from informatics lessons, not so much dealing with the theory as gaining practical skills in digital technologies. Modern visual programming environments allow them to combine mastery of theoretical and practical areas of school informatics, contributing to the development of students' thinking. This chapter validates the relevance of early learning to program in Scratch and describes a possible option for such work with students in grades 3-6 as part of an extracurricular course of a general intellectual orientation. The potential of the course to influence the students' personal, meta-subject and subject results is revealed. The thematic plans and content for teaching junior schoolchildren in the Scratch programming environment are given. The main idea of the methodology for extracurricular activities with junior schoolchildren is to work with ready-made examples according to the "use-change-addition-creation" scheme. This allows students to create digital products, such as multimedia postcards, interactive posters, games, simulators and quizzes. The content of the advanced training program "Usage methods for the Scratch programming language in extracurricular activities with students of grades 3-4, 5-6" for primary school teachers, informatics teachers and further education teachers is described. The first results of a large-scale implementation experiment for the Program, Learn and Play program are presented. More than 15,000 junior schoolchildren in the Moscow region took part in this program during the 2021/2022 academic year.