A Longitudinal Analysis on Young Children’s Coding App Usage and Schools’ Technological Support During COVID-19

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Solicited Content: COVID-19 Related

Abstract

Research shows that young children can develop valuable computational thinking and problem-solving skills through coding (Bers, 2018; Pila et al., 2019). Furthermore, it is possible to start teaching coding as early as Kindergarten, if it is done in a developmentally appropriate way (Sullivan & Bers, 2019). This study’s objective was to examine the state-level relationship between school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in which more than 1.7 billion children were affected by the school closure (Gouedard & Pont, 2020), access to devices used for coding, and the teaching and learning of coding by young children. This study focused on a popular coding app, ScratchJr, a free block-based programming introductory programming language used by over 13 million children aged 5-7 worldwide in formal and informal settings all over the world (Bers, 2019). First, I investigated the relationship between the number of ScratchJr users by U.S. state and the reported percentage of students in each state who received devices through their schools. Inaccessibility to online learning technology can potentially widen education inequality (Gouedard & Pont, 2020). Second, I examined whether this relationship changed after the end of the academic year 2020. Third, I explored whether the number of ScratchJr users in each state during the specified period was related to the state-level average median income. The analysis plan was to conduct a longitudinal regression model over 11 weeks across 50 states in the U.S. from May 2020 to July 2020. Datasets for this analysis consisted of 1) ScratchJr usage data from Google Analytics; 2) States Pulse Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau; 3) 2019 average median income and population size by states from the U.S. Census Bureau. Possible implications from this study involved understanding the impact on learning computer science of providing technological devices to students during the pandemic and the differences in usage patterns of the ScratchJr coding app based on schools’ openings and closings.

Author

• Apittha Unahalekhaka, Tufts University
  Presenting Author