Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 4.
Child-Programming Environment Interaction with the assistance of the camera
4
Extracted Guidelines via Focus Group and Content Analysis
Processes
Building on the experience from the game coding workshop, a focus group consisted
of the six experts (see table 1 above) brainstormed and organized ideas and best
practices for improving programming activities design. Using a focus group enables a
wide variety of collective views and often leads to results based on a consensus
among participants [11].
Content analysis is a technique used to categorize data (e.g., interviews, ideas)
through a protocol. Content analysis enables the researchers to sift through large
volumes of data and systematically identify properties, attributes and patterns
embedded. The technique is considered useful for identifying and analyzing issues in
gathered data [11]. In order to investigate how the experts' advices and best practices
could be specifically relevant for children, the content analysis connected those, with
three central “design” components for children [7]:
approach
,
settings
and
means
.
In particular, based on [7] 1) approach category was defined as all the attitudes and
acts that professionals should aim to perform in order to contribute to a successful
workshop; 2) settings category includes all the preconditions that help children enroll
with the workshop more willingly and 3) means category includes the best practices
referring to the concrete needs methods and materials.
The best practices and ideas of the experts could be relevant for several purposes,
as such it was considered useful to sort them in a more generic way under the
aforementioned three categories (see table 2).
