Online Scratch Programming With Compulsory School Children During COVID-19 Lockdown: An Italian Case Study

Introduction

During spring 2020, there was a worldwide outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, which caused a health emergency and, as a consequence, many countries (including Italy) opted for a lockdown in order to slow down the spread of the illness and help their sanitary system to cope with the situation. In that period, all Italian schools closed down, and did not open for the rest of the school year. This had a huge impact on students of all ages who had to start following online lessons without any prior preparation, and on teachers who needed to invent new ways to remotely manage their classes.

The lockdown, which lasted for more than four months, not only influenced teaching activities, but had also psychological and social consequences. In fact, Italy is defined as having a rather collectivist culture: kinship, family, and community are extremely important, working together and group cohesion are particularly valued. Social relationships are fundamental to maintain good levels of individual health and well-being (Burton et al., 2019). Meeting classmates and working with them can be considered just as important as the other teaching activities for students’ wellbeing, especially in a period in which it was impossible to meet other friends outside school hours.

Teachers were not prepared and were in great need for tools and methods that could be suitable for distance learning and would give students the opportunity to meet their peers and share their work with the class. Teachers’ immediate reaction was to try to organize remotely the same activities that are usually performed in class using online conferencing tools, with all the limits and difficulties that this can cause. Actually, remote online lessons are very different from traditional lessons held in a classroom. From the students’ point of view, focusing on the teacher creates a feeling of a one-to-one communication, leaving out the rest of the class and making the student feel constantly watched and controlled. Furthermore, some students felt protected by the distance and acted much more freely than they would have done in class, often forgetting about the lesson and focusing on other activities that are more satisfactory to them. On the other hand, from the teachers’ point of view, not being able to directly see all the students makes it more difficult to manage the class and keep attention high. Some teachers had to split the class into smaller groups in order to be able to interact with all the students and keep their attention high, but this required a greater effort since the teacher had to repeat the same lesson to all the groups, and often students ended up having only a few hours of lessons each day.

At the time of the COVID-19 outbreak, the Institute for Educational Technology (ITD) of the Italian National Research Council had an ongoing long-term study for the introduction of coding activities in the Italian primary schools (Chioccariello et al., 2020). Within this study, grades 4 and 5 (students aged between 8 and 11) were working in small groups on curricular based projects. When schools closed, the activity successfully continued in a remote manner, students were active and contacts with their peers were autonomously managed to continue group work. The students were using an on-line programming environment, Scratch, which also served as a “social network”. Scratch is both a programming language and an on-line learning community where students can create, share, and learn with one another (Resnick, 2017).

A question arose: would this organization also work in a different school? What are the needed characteristics that the school as a whole and the involved teachers need to have in order to successfully carry out a remote online coding activity with their students?

In this regard, in a cooperation between ITD and the Istituto Comprensivo Lozzo Atestino (IC Lozzo Atestino), which includes primary and lower secondary schools (students aged from 6 to 14), an effort was done to try to introduce online coding activities. An intervention was organized with the aim of offering teachers an initial training, followed by a Coding Day, involving directly their students. In the following background section we outline the Italian situation regarding the introduction of coding in compulsory education and then offer an overview of the theories that guided the definition of the intervention, including some considerations on the importance of peer tutoring in the organization of the activities in the emergency situation. The following section describes in detail the intervention and the analysis of the collected data. Findings are summarized in the Outcomes section and, in the end, the Future Research section offers some considerations about possible directions for future work.