Learning Logo at a high school: Constructionism versus Objectivism

In the world of education, the traditional teacher-centric pedagogy is often supported by the traditional lecture format. This methodology however, may not be the best way to assist students to learn in a computer science classroom. We have made different activities in high school to understand students’ difficulties to learn the Logo programming language. This paper describes the activities made in two classes which belong to a multimedia course with a specially adapted education syllabus and the results obtained. The population of the study consists of students from a high school in the south of Portugal who never learned a programming language before, and that have exhibited many learning difficulties and behavioural problems in the past. Some of the students are quite old with respect to their school year. Under normal circumstances, a 10 grade student should be about 15-16 years old. The fact that some of them are much older than that is due precisely to their learning difficulties and behaviour problems, resulting in a large fraction of student failures at the end of the school year. Those students are required to repeat the school year once more. Indeed, a lot of students have failed several times. Each group of students was exposed to Logo programming using different pedagogical models. We employ the traditional teacher-centric pedagogy (objectivism) in a class and apply the constructionist approach to another class. The study was made throughout 5 months with 180 minutes per week. It is important that educational systems worldwide progress towards a better future with new generations and new philosophies of education. The research described in this paper supports the notion that the role of the teacher in the classroom needs to change, and that the possibility to learn by exploration must be given to students. Specifically, it encourages prospective teachers to adopt Logo under a constructionist learning environment. The teacher is essential in the learning process to provide motivation and to aid the students in the exploration of new skills.