SCRATCH to R: Toward an Inclusive Pedagogy in Teaching Coding

Abstract SCRATCH, developed by the Media Lab at MIT, is a kid-friendly visual programming language, designed to introduce programming to children and teens in a “more thinkable, more meaningful, and more social” way. Although it was initially intended for K-12 students, educators have used it for higher education as well, and found it particularly helpful for those who haven’t had the privilege of learning coding before college. In this article, we propose using SCRATCH to create an interactive and fun project for introduction as a gateway to learn R in introductory or intermediate statistics courses. We begin with a literature review on recent K-12 computing education, as well as how visual coding has been used in college classrooms as an aid for teaching syntax-based coding. Then, we explain the design of the proposed project and share the observations from a pilot study in a liberal arts college with 39 students who had diverse coding experiences. We find that the most disadvantaged students are not those with no coding experience, but those with poor prior coding experience or with low coding self-efficacy. This innovative SCRATCH-to-R approach also offers us a pathway toward an inclusive pedagogy in teaching coding.