Journal Archive

In recent years, coding education has been carried out based on the basic common knowledge in order to live the digital world rather than simply teaching programming to be a programmer.In particular, various methods have been developed to make them interested in coding from an early age.

Coding education for children is focused on helping to understand algorithms principle naturally by play and game. It is a method that tells a loop or calculation principle without using programming terminology. Most of them are doing coding education using easy-to-use games like character-based games or drag-and-drop methods.

In this way, since it is easy to learn from a young age, the coding education has a great effect on the improvement of comprehensive thinking ability, and many countries around the world tend to introduce curriculum into regular subjects. These are the current state of coding education in each country. Coding education is expected to become a key factor in enhancing national competitiveness, and coding will become a basic education essential for the digital age.

Scratch program is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch is a visual programming language that provides a rich learning environment for people of all ages. It allows you to create interactive, media-rich projects, including animated stories, book reports, science projects, games, and simulations. The scratch is very convenient tool for learning coding in primary school students, also is effective tool to learn quickly and express student’s thoughts easily. User’s can drag and drop the block palette and attaching them to other blocks like a jigsaw puzzle. Structures of multiple blocks are called scripts[2]. This method of programming (building code with blocks) is referred to as "drag-and-drop programming"[3]. Programming is done by dragging command blocks from a palette into the scripting panel and assembling them, like puzzle pieces, to create “stacks” of blocks.

There have been several studies on the utilization of Scratch. The most of studies were related to education purpose in various areas. The results of previous studies related to Scratch are shown in Table 1.

Scratch is an intuitive language that can be programmed through block building like the LEGO block. Unlike other educational languages, Scratch makes programming easier for learners who want to start learning a programming language. So beginners are easy to understand, easy to learn, so they can learn algorithmic ways of motivating learners and approaching problems in a variety of ways to create animations.

The animation production process has been studied very deeply for a long time. It has a very systematic process from brainstorming to story composition, creating animation, and presentation. Since it is possible to make animation with Scratch, we think that coding education through creation of animation using scratch is very effective. Scratch allows users to use event-driven programming with multiple active objects called sprites[4]. Sprites are created as vector or bitmap images and can be created directly through the scratch editor, or it can be imported from other sources. Scratch contains 10 groups of blocks such as motion, looks, sounds, pen, data, control, events, sensing, operators and more blocks. These blocks are essential elements for animation production.

This research is implemented in five stages of the animation creation based on coding. Fig. 1 shows the stages for the process of animation production based on coding.

Fig. 1. 
Learning model of animation production

For the test of this learning model, we have 5 male and female elementary students aged 11, in South Korea. The students were familiar with computer-based education, since the use of laptops is an essential part of their curriculum. They had never learned coding before, but some had prior experience of an animation and story creation. This program proceeded for 7 weeks to make an animation from scratch based on their own story creation.

First stage is a story planning stage that students can brainstorming the idea for story creation. Some students have a experience about story creation but the other have a hard time to create their own story from scratch. We suggest to them to using Story Starters from Scholastic. Scholastic's Story Starters kids' writing activity generates creative writing prompts, from general fiction to adventure, fantasy, and science fiction. Students can choose a theme and then produce prompts using the Spin lever. They can adjust one piece of the prompt at a time with the Spin This Wheel buttons[5]. Fig. 2 shows the Story Starters from Scholastic.

Fig. 2. 
Story Starters from Scholastic

Second stage is a story composition stage that students can create 7 to 8 events based on Freytag's pyramid. First, we introduce to them about Aristotle’s three-act structure. Aristotle is a famous Greek philosopher, scientist and poet, could be the first person to bring up the idea of plot structure. As he said: “A plot must have, a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the events of the plot must causally relate to one another as being either necessary or probable.”[6]. It consist of three stages which is beginning , middle and ending.

The beginning stage is the set up stage and, we introduce to them how to set up the characters and setting. The middle stage is the confrontation stage and, we introduce to them to develop the story so that it leads up to an exciting climax. The ending stage is the resolution of the story and, we introduce to them how to solve the conflicts and end the story. As you build a story, you must set up the characters and make up the various events that the person makes, and reveal the thoughts, emotions, greed, and desires that are in their inner worlds in the ambassadors and trivial actions that are delivered through their mouths[7]. Second, we introduce to them about narrative structure based on Freytag's pyramid. Gustav Freytag is a contemporary German novelist and playwright. Freytag considered plot as a narrative structure that divided a story into five parts, which is known as Freytag's pyramid[8]. Fig. 3 shows the Freytag's pyramid. After demonstrating and explain Freytag's pyramid with many stories, students assigned their stories to the Freytag's pyramid and created seven to eight events. Fig. 4 shows the story structure setting from student work based on Freytag's pyramid.

Fig. 3. 
Freytag's pyramid

Fig. 4. 
Story events based on freytag's pyramid (student work)

Third stage is a pre-production stage that students collect data for animation production such as sound, image and script. We also explain basic information about what Scratch is. students are introduced to Scratch programming project by viewing a collection of example projects, so they can think what will be able to do in Scratch.

Fourth stage is a production stage that students create animation using scratch. In the beginning of this stage, student need to create dialogue between their sprites based on their story. When students were ready to create animations, we taught coding for three weeks. Scratch consists of ten blocks of commands under the Scripts tab, which you drag blocks from Scripts tab into the screen area. Fig. 5 shows the main programming blocks in order to create an animation in Scratch. The forth stage of instruction focused on the core blocks such as Motion, Looks, Sound, Events, Sensing and Control. The forth stage of training was conducted for two hours per week. The first week consisted of learning the basics of scratch and sprites. The second week consisted of learning how to move the sprite and put the bubble in the dialogue between the characters. The third week consisted of event-driven programming to determine when actions was should occur. Students are encouraged to create animations based on what they have learned each week, and the video tutorial allowed them to continue to study scratches outside of class hours.

Fig. 5. 
The main programming blocks for animation

After three weeks of scratch learning, students set the characters and background images of the story. After collecting the image, create a dialog to be inserted into the animation and create the animation using scratch. Fig. 6 shows the student animation work utilizing the programming blocks in Scratch.

Fig. 6. 
Scratch animation (student’s work)

Fifth stage is performance distribution stage that students showing their work in class and posting in Scratch web-site. Students can upload their projects, share ideas with other users and look at each other's projects. Students can upload their work directly to the Scratch website, and community members can download the full source code so that they can create and edit it with other projects[9][10][11]. You can also develop your project by entering your ideas into other users' projects. Students can share and develop with each other.

Fig. 7. 
Uploaded student work in Scratch Website