Pro(g)natura: programming language and curriculum development from the free initiative of children in nature

Abstract

Currently, within the Curriculum Autonomy and Flexibility Project (CAFC), schools are invited to transform teaching and change the way the curriculum has been managed, making it more appropriate to the context in which it’s developed and to which it’s developed for this century: a teaching process centred on the student, on his/her needs and on his/her interests. This article aims to present some results of Pro(g)Natura (PgN), an educational program that combines and articulates the teaching and learning processes of Scratch programming language, nature environment and classroom. This is a program that results from a partnership between three community projects: All in Scratch, for technological education, Invisible Limits, for education in nature and E7G Trampoline, for social inclusion. Pro(g)Natura articulates the benefits of regular contact with nature, prioritizing the free initiative of the student, and the Teaching of programming with the teaching and learning environment in the classroom, within the scope of the development of the CAFC. Starting in the 2018/2019 school year, this project involved the participation of three groups of students from the 1st year of the 1st cycle, from three schools, from a group of schools in the city of Coimbra – Portugal. The data that we present is part of a larger study and it’s referred to the middle evaluation of this project, with a total duration of four years. This study is based on the participation of 41 students and 2 teachers in the Pro(g)Natura educational program. The data presented refers to the perception of the children’s guardians regarding the articulation impact from the three referred contexts for the promotion of general competences in students. For this study, questionnaires were applied to the parents of the participating students. The analysis of the responses of the 23 supervisors who responded to the survey allows us to understand that PgN will have contributed positively to the development of essential student learning, with regard to the acquisition of general skills, related to the effective use of codes that allow students to express, represent, select and disseminate knowledge.