THE USE OF SCRATCH SOFTWARE IN THE PRODUCTION OF MATHEMATICAL KNOWLEDGE AND DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTATIONAL THINKING
Computational thinking; Mathematic; Scratch
Computational thinking has been increasingly discussed in educational systems in many countries. Since the approval of the Common National Curriculum Base (BNCC), in 2017, the first official document on the subject, the number of studies on how to develop skills and competences related to computational thinking (PC) in the school environment has grown. In this context, a qualitative research was carried out in order to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of using Scratch software for teaching Mathematics and developing computational thinking in basic education, based on the evaluation of a group of Mathematics teachers from Tangará da Serra-MT. 14 teachers who work in elementary and high school participated in the study. The production of data for analysis took place through a training course with a workload of 80 hours. For data analysis, Discursive Textual Analysis (ATD) was used. The research corpus consists of reports prepared by the course participants, open and closed questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and productions/artifacts developed in Scratch. The theoretical foundation came from texts on the relationships of Mathematics and computational thinking with the use of Scratch software. The analysis was performed by three categories: favorable and unfavorable characteristics of Scratch; Math and PC skills mobilized with the use of Scracth and the most favorable productions/artifacts for the teaching of Mathematics and development of computational thinking in the school environment. The results reveal that teachers consider the use of Scratch fruitful for teaching Mathematics and developing computational thinking in the school environment. The main disadvantage pointed out by teachers is linked to the time required to develop artifacts in Scratch.