Designing and comparing two Scratch-based teaching approaches for students aged 10-12 years — extended version

Programming and computational thinking are becoming more important
in primary education. This raises the question of how different
approaches to teaching programming in primary schools
compare with each other. We designed two approaches to teach
programming to primary school students. One approach uses the
instructionistic 4C/ID model, the other approach uses constructionism.
The learning gains of these two approaches were compared
using a pre- and post test. In total, 129 students from two di!erent
schools participated. A signi"cant di!erence (p = .037, d = .59)
between the two approaches was found on one of the schools, favoring
the 4C/ID approach. On the other school and for the total
group no signi"cant di!erence was found. This is explained by
the di!erent backgrounds between the students from the di!erent
schools.