Analysing Students’ Scratch Programs and Addressing Issues using Elementary Patterns

In this Work in Progress paper in the Research Category we report on existing concerns about Scratch programming, and introduce patterns as a possible solution. Scratch is a popular language for introducing students to programming, but there is a concern that the students might not be exposed to all the key elements of programming when the development environment tempts them to explore elements such as the range of sprites available. We propose the use of programming patterns as a measure of the sophistication of student work. To understand the importance of patterns we report on our initial work that analyzes a large number of projects from the public Scratch repository to evaluate how extensively the basic patterns appear in student work. This can help inform the improvement of teaching methods to include use of broader range of patterns.