TY - JOUR
AU - Franklin, Diana
AB -  Floors and Flexibility: Designing a Programming Environment for 4th-6th Grade Classrooms Charlotte Hill, Hilary A. Dwyer, Tim Martinez, Danielle Harlow, Diana Franklin {charlottehill, franklin}@cs.ucsb.edu, {hdwyer, dharlow}@education.ucsb.edu, tmartinez@umail.ucsb.edu Computer Science Department UC Santa Barbara Gevirtz Graduate School of Education UC Santa Barbara ABSTRACT The recent renaissance in early computer science education has provided K-12 teachers with multiple options for introducing children to computer science. However, tools for teaching programming for children with wide-scale adoption have been targeted mostly at pre-readers or middle school and higher gradelevels. This leaves a gap for 4th ­ 6th grade students, who differ developmentally from older and younger students. In this paper, we investigate block-based programming languages targeted at elementary and middle school students and demonstrate a gap in existing programming languages appropriate for 4th ­ 6th grade classrooms. We analyze the benefits of Scratch, ScratchJr, and Blockly for students and curriculum developers. We describe the design principles we created based on our experiences using block-based programming in 4th ­ 6th grade classrooms, and introduce LaPlaya, a language and development environment designed specifically for children in the gap between grades K-3 and middle school students. grade levels and integrating the subject into K-8 schooling 
TI - Floors and Flexibility: Designing a Programming Environment for 4th-6th Grade Classrooms
DA - 2015-02-24
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/floors-and-flexibility-designing-a-programming-environment-for-4th-6th-fMcSd4Cyi1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -