Investigation of the effect of block-based scratch education and applications on scientific creativity and computational thinking skills of pre-school teachers

This research aims to examine the effect of pre-school teacher candidates' education based on block-based Scratch applications on their computational thinking skills and scientific creativity. Within this scope the pretest and posttest were designed in a quasi-experimental design model with a control group. The research group consists of 50 pre-school teacher candidates studying at a state university in Turkey at bachelor degree. The education of Block-based Scratch applications designed for the experimental group took 10 weeks. After the training, pre-service teachers were asked to prepare projects for science and mathematics education achievements in the Scratch program. The data of the research were "Scientific Creativity Scale", "Computer Thinking Scale" and "Dr. It was collected with the Scratch Evaluation Tool and the Scratch Project Evaluation Rubric. Quantitative data analysis method was used in the analysis of the collected data. The findings showed that education based on Block-based Scratch applications was effective on pre-school teacher candidates' computational thinking skills and scientific creativity skills. Computational thinking skills; It consists of five sub-factors: collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, algorithmic thinking and problem solving. Considering the experimental and control groups, in the sub-dimensions of the computational thinking scale; A significant difference was determined between the posttest scores of creativity, algorithmic thinking and critical thinking dimensions. However, there was no statistically significant difference in collaborative and problem solving dimensions. A significant difference was found in the scientific creativity total pretest and posttest scores in the scientific creativity scale for experimental group. In the control group, there was no significant difference in scientific creativity total pretest and posttest scores. According to the Dr. Scratch evaluation rubric; It is seen that 18 (62.1%) of the Scratch projects prepared by pre-service teachers are at the developing level and 11 (37.9%) are at the expert level. While the most common programming concepts which parallelism and synchronization used by pre-service teachers in their projects are flow control, at least it is seen that there is logical thinking. Within this scope, it is recommended dissemination of the method that block-based scratch training and applications have been shown to have a positive effect on developing computational thinking skills and scientific creativity.