Back to Blog
Elinks raspberry pi5/17/2023 Much more information about the programme and the materials, which are freely available for use, can be found on the ScratchMaths project’s website, and you can also read a research paper describing the project.Īs at all our research seminars, participants had many questions for our speaker. Covering two subjects and drawing the links between them without detriment to the core learning is potentially a benefit to schools who need to fit many subjects into their teaching day. She also drew out the positive perspective that children in the trial learned two subjects at the same time without any detriment to their learning of mathematics. ![]() Teachers in the ScratchMaths project participated in professional development (two days per module) to enable them to understand the materials and the pedagogical approach.Īt the end of the project, external evaluators measured the childrens’ learning and found a statistically significant increase in computational thinking skills after the first year, but no difference between an intervention group and a control group in the mathematical thinking outcomes in the second year (as measured by the national mathematics tests at that age).Ĭelia discussed a number of reasons for these findings. bridgE: Make explicit links to the mathematics curriculum.Exchange: Collaborate & share, try to see a problem from another’s perspective as well as defend your own approach and compare with others.Explain: Explain what you have done, articulate reasons behind your approach to others.Envisage: Have a goal in mind, predict outcome of program before trying.Explore: Investigate, try things out yourself, debug in reaction to feedback.This enables teachers to understand the structure and sequencing of the materials as they use them in the classroom: All the ScratchMaths materials were designed around a pedagogical framework called the 5Es: explore, envisage, explain, exchange, and bridge. In the first year, pupils take three computational thinking modules, and in the second year, they move to three more mathematical thinking modules. ScratchMaths is for use in upper primary school (age 9–11) over a two-year period. ![]() Learning mathematics through Scratch programmingĬelia and a team* at University College London developed a curriculum initiative called ScratchMaths to teach carefully selected mathematical concepts through programming (funded by the Education Endowment Foundation in 2014–2018). It also enables the development of both computational and mathematical thinking, as Celia described in her talk. Since programming includes the design, building, and debugging of artefacts, it is a great approach for make such abstract concepts come to life. Yet some mathematical concepts can seem abstract and teachers have struggled over the years to help children to understand them. Mathematics is a subject we all need to understand the basics of - it underpins much of our other learning and empowers us in daily life. For all these reasons, we were delighted to hear her present at a Raspberry Pi Foundation computing education research seminar. As well as authoring literally hundreds of academic papers on mathematics education, including on Logo programming, she has received a number of prestigious awards and honours, and has served as the Chief Advisor to the UK government on mathematics in school. Thus for many years the links between mathematics and programming have been evident, and we were very fortunate to be able to explore this topic with our research seminar guest speaker, Professor Dame Celia Hoyles of University College London.ĭame Celia Hoyles is a huge celebrity in the world of mathematical education and programming. Educational programming languages such as Logo were widely used in both primary and secondary education settings during the 1980s and 90s. He believed that programming could give children tangible and concrete experiences to support their acquisition of mathematical concepts. Papert, together with others, developed the Logo programming language in 1967 to help children develop concepts in both mathematics and in programming. ![]() He developed the theoretical approach to learning we now know as constructionism, which purports that learning takes place through building artefacts that have meaning and can be shared with others. We owe much of what we have learned about children learning to program to Seymour Papert (1928–2016), who not only was a great mathematician and computer scientist, but also an inspirational educationalist. “In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.” – Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas, 1980
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |