TEACHING AND LEARNING MATHEMATICS IN PRIMARY SCHOOL THROUGH SCRATCH

Programming education is a hot topic in many countries around the world. Also, in Sweden this topic has received a lot of attention lately due to formal introduction of programming curriculum as of 2018. Mathematics is one of the subjects that is most affected by the curriculum changes as the government in Sweden has decided that teachers of mathematics are to teach programming in compulsory school in order to support problem-solving in mathematics. Albeit there are some previous research investigating questions related to how programming can enhance mathematics education, for instance in form of the seminal work of Papert through the LOGO language, more research is required that scrutinize how new visual block programming language such as Scratch can be used for mathematical learning. It is against such a background we in this paper report on how Scratch has been used in primary school for two years to teach mathematics. We will present four different projects that a teacher has planned and conducted with 68 students that target four different areas of mathematics. As such we describe the didactical strategies that were employed to help students achieve the learning goals, and the associated challenges. We hope that the presentation can be helpful for other teachers and researchers interested in using visual block programming languages for teaching and learning mathematics.