Analysis of Scratch Projects of an Introductory Programming Course for Primary School Students

Computer Science (CS) is increasingly entering the early levels of early childhood education, like primary school or even kindergarten. Therefore, it becomes more and more important to gain insight into which teaching methods and content would be appropriate for young students of primary levels. To investigate this, we have designed a specific three-day introductory programming course for 4th grade students (ages 9 - 10), which was taught four times up to now. Fifty-eight children (26 girls and 32 boys) participated in the courses from May to August 2016. At the end of the courses, the children have developed 127 Scratch projects during the course. The methodology and the results of the qualitative analysis are described in this paper. We discovered that the students created three different types of programs in particular: Stories, Animations, and Games. The level of understanding of the students, who programmed a Game, was mostly found to be advanced. Stories, on the other hand, reached only the two basic levels. Most of the students met the requirements we had set for the projects.