Ensino de Computação com SCRATCH no Ensino Fundamental – Um Estudo de Caso

Although computing is present in all sectors of society today, the population still lacks knowledge and interest in this area. One of the reasons is the lack of computing education in elementary school. The typical education focusing only on the use of IT (IT literacy) is no longer sufficient. Already in elementary school we need to teach IT fluency, including computational thinking and programming. This is currently a worldwide trend and there exist several computing environments to teach students at this age. One of the most popular is SCRATCH - a visual programming language with which chil-dren can program and share interactive stories, games and animations. However, there are few re-searches available that have been adapted to and applied in Brazilian reality. Within this context, this research proposes an instructional unit for computing education in elementary schools in an interdis-ciplinary way using SCRATCH in conformance with the curriculum guidelines for K-12. The in-structional unit was implemented and evaluated within a first year class in Florianopolis/SC. Results demonstrate that the instructional unit and the use of SCRATCH enabled the learning of basic com-puting concepts (specifically programming) in an effective and fun way and also arouse interest and motivation of students with respect to this field of knowledge.