Text Processing Education Using a Block-Based Programming Language

In this paper, we present a novel approach to teach text processing for primary and secondary school students using a block-based programming language such as Scratch. Our main idea is to have students (1) build “basic building blocks” for text processing and then (2) to use them to create our example text processing applications. Here, we slightly modified Scratch to make it easy for students to create these basic building blocks. Also, because our example applications are based on the Data & Analysis subconcepts (Storage, Collection, Visualization, Transformation, and Inference & Models) of ACM CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards, students can achieve these standards and gain an understanding of text processing by implementing them. We conducted two lectures using our approach for primary/secondary school teachers, and the teachers who responded to our survey gave high scores on average on most of its evaluation measures. We also conducted an in-depth analysis of the survey results, including a comparison with other survey results in similar groups.