Teaching Programming in Moodle

Teaching Programming in Moodle

by DaVinci Menno -
Number of replies: 9

Dear Moodlers,

I am looking for a plugin that I can use in Moodle to teach programming to children (between the age of 6 and 12 years old). 
For that, I tried the Virtual Programming Lab, which looks awesome but is a little too hardcore for children if you'd ask me. 


Therefore, I was looking to implement Scratch into Moodle. A previous topic dates back from 2014, referring to the plugin for Moodle 2.2. 

Which leaves me two questions which I hope you could answer:

1. Which programming plugins (could) you'd recommend me to use for children?

2. Is Scratch as referred to in this topic still applicable for Moodle 3.8 and 3.9?

Any suggestions will be very much appreciated.


Kind regards,

Menno

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In reply to DaVinci Menno

Re: Teaching Programming in Moodle

by AL Rachels -
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Hi DaVinci,
I don't know anything about the Scratch plugin you are referring to, but if your children are using MS Windows, have you considered using MS Small Basic? It is a free download with access to a lot of example files to try out and modify, as well as some tutorials. It is very simple and easy to learn, but it can also be used for some pretty complicated programming projects.

Something about it that seems to be new since I retired from teaching and using it with my students, is that it also now has the capability of programming online. The online version has a link to multiple tutorials. It works great from my desktop windows computer. I was also able to get it to start on my Android phone and my iPad. Unfortunately, when I ran the first little sample program, in both cases I could not readily figure out how to get my onscreen keyboard to show up for use in the terminal window of the running program. Unfortunately, I don't really have the time to pursue it further, right now.

Neither version directly integrates with Moodle, but for grading I just used an assignment set up for offline activity grades. This let me use a rubric and I could grade results just about as fast as I could run each students submission.
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In reply to DaVinci Menno

Re: Teaching Programming in Moodle

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
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Hi

Your search is quite broad.

- On "Teaching Programming", are you thinking of computer programming in general, means you are open to the programming language or have you chosen Scratch?

- On "Teaching Programming _in Moodle_", of course Moodle won't teach. The teacher, you, either has to create the course, or convert an existing course to make use of the tools provided by Moodle. So it all depends on you.
wink
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In reply to DaVinci Menno

Re: Teaching Programming in Moodle

by Tim Hunt -
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The CodeRunner question type is probalby worth a look: https://coderunner.org.nz/
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Teaching Programming in Moodle

by Bjørn Teistung -
Hi, Tim.
Is it possible to use CodeRunner in other activities like page, lesson and book as well, not only as question type in quiz? Today we embed code from Trinket.io, but want more control of student traffic and tracking.
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In reply to Bjørn Teistung

Re: Teaching Programming in Moodle

by Tim Hunt -
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You can use this with https://github.com/moodleou/moodle-filter_embedquestion

You can't use it with Lesson.
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In reply to DaVinci Menno

Re: Teaching Programming in Moodle

by Brendon Hatcher -
Hi

I guess the really important question is why you want Scratch in Moodle.

One answer would be simple continuity - they open a Moodle course, then a topic, then an activity, and then do it in scratch without having to jump around.
You can embed scratch projects as iframe elements.

Another answer would be that you want to record their activities and assign grades based on them.
For this, you probably need to look elsewhere to something that does scoring.

Regards
Brendon
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In reply to Brendon Hatcher

Re: Teaching Programming in Moodle

by Carl Stensfer -
I remember that I started studying programming with MS Small Basic. I liked working with it, but over time its functionality became scarce and we stopped using it for training.
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