Results of the Compose and Code Platform for Improving Students’ Computational Thinking, Computing Attitudes, and Multimodal Writing

• In Event: Educational Innovation Through Technology: From Coding Platforms to Bilingual Learning Programs

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a digital platform called Compose and Code (CoCo) and its accompanying lessons for improving students’ computational thinking, interest in coding, and multimodal writing outcomes. CoCo is a digital learning platform that embeds self-regulated learning strategies audio comments, video models, and text-to-speech to help scaffold written composition and computational thinking (CT), and ultimately guide students to code creative projects from their writing using Scratch. CoCo was specifically developed to support students of all abilities in learning to code and think computationally. CoCo has been under development and iteratively revised over several years as part of a larger project. This paper reports results from our third and final year of refinement.

Authors

• Amy C. Hutchison, University of Alabama

• Erdogan Kaya, George Mason University

• Qi Si, University of Alabama

• Vahid Mousavi, University of Alabama