Student-Teachers’ Abilities and Attitudes towards Scratch as a Multimedia Construction tool to Represent Physical Geography Phenomena

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe a didactic intervention that aimed to introduce pre-service teachers to visual programming with the ultimate goal of enabling them to support their students on constructing multimedia in the context of Geography in the future. Students created multimedia software about Physical Geography topics using MIT Scratch. The way the students used scientific knowledge and did the didactic transformation in order to build their artefacts has been presented elsewhere. In this article students’ ability and attitudes on programming are examined. More specifically, we study the techniques and programming structures students use, as an indicator of what students learned. Furthermore, we study difficulties on programming and other technical difficulties they confront, as well as their attitudes towards Scratch which developed through the didactic intervention. The results are encouraging since students create software that work properly and develop a positive attitude toward Scratch.