Understanding coding activities for teens: a focus on school teachers' perspectives

Abstract

Over the last few years, researchers, teachers, parents, volunteers, and even IT companies have joined efforts to develop coding activities for children in K-12 education. These efforts include technological tools and programming environments as well as activities descriptions. Kodeløypa is a coding activity offered by NTNU, which focuses on engaging teens in creative programming. In this paper, we report about the design and implementation of an empirical investigation with 13 teachers who attended Kodeløypa as associated school teachers of the pupils from their respective schools. In this study, we have addressed the following research question: What are the teachers' understandings of coding activities for teens outside the schools? The goal of this study was to identify various factors that will help us to acquire knowledge on this important kind of stakeholders, and improve the design and implementation of Kodeløypa and other similar efforts. We have conducted a thematic analysis with the data and we expect the results of this study will help teachers and researchers to design and organize computer science learning activities more efficiently and collaboratively.