Teaching Design And Practical Research On Scratch Animation Production For Elementary School

With the rapid development of today's information technology,computational thinking is the basic skill that everyone should have.Judging from the current teaching state of information technology subject in primary and secondary schools,teachers stress more on students' related operative skills,so that the phenomenon of students' lack of thinking is quite serious.Scratch is a graphical programming software for children developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT),which can visualize the computing process.However,in the actual teaching process,due to the different types of works that Scratch can accomplish,there are many Scratch cases available for teachers to choose from,which are difficult to control in terms of variety and difficulty.Moreover,the development of students' thinking requires a process,especially for those who have never been exposed to programming in primary school,and it may take more than one lesson to digest and absorb an instruction.As a result,some programming methods may not be fully understood.Therefore,this study focuses on one of the types of Scratch works,“animation production”,as a research direction,allowing students to have the space to boldly use their imaginations and develop comprehensive application capabilities such as scriptwriting,storytelling,and character design.Animation scripts need not be too complex,and students can complete a creative story work by learning some basic calculation concepts and animation principles.It should be noted that in the animation production process,the thinking process that the students perform before the computer(or person)solves the problem is called computational thinking,and the computer plays the role of allowing the solution to be executed automatically: because embodying computational thinking in solving problems is not based on whether or not a computer is used as a basis for judgment,but whether the human brain uses computer scientists' thinking methods.Based on the above and the research related to combing computational thinking,the author first defines the four focus of computational thinking,including “problem decomposition,” “abstraction,” “algorithm,” and “automation.” Secondly,according to the general process of animation production,the author constructs a teaching model for Scratch animation production for computational thinking in primary school,and designs corresponding teaching tools for the cultivation of computational thinking;Finally,the author conducts a one-semester instructional design and practical research on animation production in Scratch community class of a certain experiment point primary school,and using a test questionnaire,classroom observation and work evaluation helps the students to master the methods of using Scratch to create animations,which develops students' sense of computational thinking,and lays a foundation for future learning.After analysis,it has been concluded that the students' "decomposition" and "abstraction" abilities are generally improved,and that "algorithm" ability is not enough to be clearly reflected;at the same time,due to differences in students' age and level,students of low age need to be foreshadowing.Finally,all students' knowledge should be integrated;computational thinking requires long-term training,and students must be given enough time to “do it themselves,” and to imitate firstly and innovate later.For computational thinking,Scratch itself as a carrier and tool to actively explore its teaching model,in order to guide the teaching reform,need to continue to practice and improve in follow-up research.