The effect of block-based teaching method on academic achievement of secondary school students in robotic coding training

The aim of this research is to investigate the effect of block-based coding on the academic success of the students in the information technologies and software course. There has been used pre-post test semi-experimental research design in the research. The research was carried out with the students in the 5th grade who attended the class from a state school in the first semester in the year of 2018/2019 Education and Training period.The Robotics coding training has been applied in a period of 10 weeks.The sampling of the study was carried out with a total of 130 students, 66 of whom were experimental and 64 of them were control groups. While the experimental group received robotics coding training with block-based (mblock) coding method, the control group was trained with the text-based (Arduino) coding method. To determine the level of students' academic achievement in the pre and post-test the Academic Achievement Test was used.The data gathered throughout the research was analyzed by IBM SPSS Statistics 20.0 software. They were analyzed by nonparametric (Mann Whitney U and Wilcoxon Signed Ranks) tests since the data collected did not show normal distribution. At the end of the research, according to the findings the academic achievement of the experimental group, which was studied by using block-based encoding method, was higher than the control group, which was studied by using text-based encoding (Arduino), and the difference between the groups was found to be significant in favor of the experimental group.