Teaching Programming Skills in Primary School Mathematics Classes: An Evaluation using Game Programming

The integration of programming into the school curriculum has become increasingly important, especially in places and class levels where computer science is not yet available as a subject of its own. In this paper we investigate the performance of a class of sixth grade students who were trained in programming as part of their regular mathematics curriculum following the method of Forster [ACM SIGITE'16], which uses programming as a teaching tool for geometry skills. As a final project the students were tasked to program a computer game in Scratch, by which we gauge the students programming skills using the methodology proposed by Funke et al. [IEEE EDUCON'17], as well as the automatic quality assessment tool Dr. Scratch. We compare our results with the results reported by Funke et al. from over 50 students, and with the automatic quality assessment scores of a data set of 250K Scratch programs published by Aivaloglou et al. [MSR'17]. Our pilot study shows that introductory programming skills taught as part of mathematics classes, aiming at the improvement of geometry skills, also satisfy the computer science requirements of an introductory programming course.