How to Transform Programming Processes in Scratch to Graphical Visualizations

Currently in many countries efforts are undertaken to bring programming education into the early levels of childhood education, like primary school or even kindergarten. Therefore, it is becoming more and more important to gain insight into which teaching methods and content would be appropriate for young students of primary levels. For this, we have designed a specific three-day introductory programming course for 4th-grade students (ages 9-10), which was held four times up to now. Fifty-eight children (26 girls and 32 boys) participated in the courses from May to August 2016. Besides the analysis of the course results, it is particularly interesting, in which way the programming processes of the children take place and if there are distinguishable types of young programming learners. During the courses, we captured the screens of the students' laptops and also filmed all the events in the classroom. In a case study, we used these recordings and videos to investigate the programming processes of two students (one girl and one boy from the same class). After the coding process of the videos, we developed a new visualization technique to illustrate the processes and to explore differences and special features of the individual approaches.