OntoScratch: ontologias para representação e avaliação de habilidades do pensamento computacional em projetos Scratch

Abstract

A lot of initiatives seeking to introduce concepts and habilities related to computational thinking are underway in countries across Europe, in the United States, and, more recently, in Brazil. An example of that is the application of the project “Creative Computing Clubs”, carried out since 2015 in public schools in the city of Pelotas/RS. Among the list of skills and knowledge covered, the stimulus to the development of computational thinking through visual programming tools, such as Scratch, stands out due to its practical and low-cost approach. However, in this scenario, new challenges arise, such as the storage of the data collected in these activities, so that they can be worked on and so that they can generate evidence of the impact of teaching computational thinking. In this matter, the absence of a knowledge representation that is capable of characterizing the data of activities and evaluations that use Scratch in a way that allows the analysis of the student’s evolution or the realization of other inferences about these data is clear. Therefore, this work aims to create and develop a knowledge representation that attacks these problems, describing a Scratch project and the computational thinking skills assessments performed on it, in a structure that provides support for the use of this data for further work. It is expected that this representation will be able to support the use of intelligent mechanisms, enabling the performance of analyzes and inferences that assist in the understanding of the knowledge acquired by the student, its evolution, and other aspects related to his learning. These objectives could be achieved through the design and development of OntoScrath, a set of ontologies for representing knowledge involving the teaching of computational thinking through Scratch. Through this representation, it is possible to store, in a structured way, students’ paths in this process, allowing the analysis of their learning process. This representation exhibited its potential for inference in the evaluation performed, being able to faithfully reproduce, through SPARQL queries, the computational thinking skills’ evaluation of the tool Dr. Scratch.