Our website is meant to introduce elementary school educators (K-7) to effective and easy technology tools, such as Scratch, in their classrooms. Scratch is an ideal tool for educators to get familiar with and to introduce their classroom to expand students’ coding and computational thinking and skills. Educators will use Scratch’s visual interface, with intuitive drag-and-drop coding blocks, to make programming concepts accessible to younger learners, sparking creativity, problem-solving, and collaboration through game-like activities (Resnick et al., 2009).

This website would also allow educators to empower their students to be creative and create their own animations, stories, and games, allowing students to be active creators rather than passive consumers of technology. Thus, the website creates an opportunity for students to take ownership of their learning and projects, fostering their curiosity-based exploration and hands-on participation that aligns with their personal interests and inquiry.

Additionally, our website and Scratch’s community features promote collaboration and social learning, allowing students to share work, give feedback, and learn from one another, stimulating Vygotskiĭ’s zone of proximal development (ZPD) ideas (Vygotskiĭ, 1978). These features make Scratch a valuable resource for educators and their students, promoting students’ creativity and teamwork in a supportive and interactive environment (Brennan, Resnick, & Monroy-Hernández, 2010).

Gamification brings engaging elements from games, such as points, achievements, and sense of ownership, into classrooms and learning spaces to foster creativity and engagement. According to Zickermann (2010), “gamification is not just making a game to impart a lesson; it is about applying game thinking to how we deliver that lesson and continuously developing it based on player feedback” (Folmar, 2015, p.5). This approach transforms traditional instruction by focusing on the learning journey with all the collaboration in the process rather than just the end goals, encouraging students to have pride in their work and owning it.

Research demonstrates a positive impact of gamification introduction, especially when it comes to students’ motivation and engagement. Ratinho and Martins (2023) suggest that gamification creates a positive impact on student motivation; similarly, Brewer et al. (2013) noted an increase in task completion rates when learning used gamified tools. Unlike traditional instructional methods where rewards take place only after completion of a certain task, gamification embeds reward mechanisms throughout the learning process, supporting students’ experiences and gratification as they tackle challenges.

As teachers use Scratch with a gamified learning environment in mind, they can design interactive tasks where students improve their skills as they explore and complete coding projects. This will encourage students to make and examine mistakes and iterations as part of the learning process, thus, aligning with the findings of Powers and Moore (2021). Their review on “failure states in game-based learning” suggests that if there is a healthy balance between risk and reward during a task or assignment, it can enhance students’ motivation, participation, and memory retention. Thus, making Scratch’s trivial failure settings allow students freedom to experiment without restrictions, fostering confidence and resilience through controlled failure setting.

James P. Gee, a prominent scholar on video games and learning, has emphasized, numerous times in his works, the educational potential of games to foster critical thinking and problem-solving skills in students (Gee, 2008). In his work, “Cats and Portals: Video Games, Learning, and Play,” Gee (2008) argues that certain games can help prompt students to use and develop skills, particularly in various virtual worlds that encourage experimentation and play. For example, while working on Scratch projects, students will be required to sequence events, debug code while experimenting, and apply logical reasoning, which are core factors of computational thinking. These actions parallel Gee’s findings on how video games, like The Sims or Civilization, encourage students to analyze scenarios and outcomes, further fostering problem solving skills that are applicable to the real world (Gee, 2008).

Similarly, Gee and Gee’s (2017) work in ”Games as Distributed Teaching and Learning Systems” explores how digital games can enable students to learn from experience, using distributed systems which spread the learning process across created characters/scenarios, game mechanics, and digital environment. This framework supports inquiry-based learning, where students explore Scratch, troubleshoot issues, and iterate on the designs. The aforementioned elements provide a vast, collaborative learning experience that promotes agency, ownership, and autonomy in students’ learning, as they set their own goals and explore solutions creatively while using Scratch.

Our website will encourage educators to use Scratch with its collaborative features that support project-based learning by allowing students to share projects, give feedback, and support others in creation of animations or games. This social component aligns perfectly with Gee and Gee’s (2017) argument that digital games create new forms of turn-taking dialogue, which is quite distinct from traditional learning interactions.  Using Scratch, students may collaborate on coding projects, share ideas, and receive constructive feedback from educators or fellow peers, echoing the distributed teaching and zone of proximal development learning that promotes knowledge sharing and communal participation.

Also, this back and forth between students as they work on a project can support them to develop resilience and growth mindset, as they learn to give and receive feedback constructively. Powers and Moore (2021) found that failure, when appropriately managed in a gamified setting, can improve students’ participation and learning. In Scratch, educators facilitate students’ work, as they iterate on their projects without penalties, learning from trial and error in a supportive, low risk environment. Since educators will frame failure as part of the learning process, students will be more likely to persist through challenges and perceive mistakes as stepping stones during the learning process rather than as setbacks.

References

Brennan, K., Monroy-Hernández, A., & Resnick, M. (2010). Making projects, making friends: Online community as catalyst for interactive media creation. New Directions for Youth Development, 2010(128), 75–83. https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.377

Brewer, R., Anthony, L., Brown, Q., Irwin, G., Nias, J., & Tate, B. (2013). Using gamification to motivate children to complete empirical studies in lab environments. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, 388–391. https://doi.org/10.1145/2485760.2485816

Gee, J. P. (2008). Cats and Portals: Video Games, Learning, and Play. American Journal of Play, 1(2), 229–245.

Gee, E., & Gee, J. P. (2017). Games as Distributed Teaching and Learning Systems. Teachers College Record, 119(12), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811711901202

Folmar, D. (2015). Game it up!: Using gamification to incentivize your library. Rowman & Littlefield.

Powers, F. E., & Moore, R. L. (2021). When Failure Is an Option: A Scoping Review of Failure States in Game-Based Learning. TechTrends, 65(4), 615–625. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-021- 00606-8

Ratinho, E., & Martins, C. (2023). The role of gamified learning strategies in student’s motivation in high school and higher education: A systematic review. Heliyon, 9(8), e19033–e19033.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e19033

Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Monroy-Hernández, A., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., Millner, A., Rosenbaum, E., Silver, J., Silverman, B., & Kafai, Y. (2009). Scratch: Programming for All. Communications of the ACM, 52(11), 60–67. https://doi.org/10.1145/1592761.1592779

Vygotskiĭ, L. S. (Lev S., & Cole, M. (1978). Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

Zickermann, G. (2010, October 26). Fun is the future: Mastering gamification. [Video file]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O1gNVeaE4g