Glossary

Written for someone who has never taught computing: a parent handed a leaflet, a subject teacher handed a scheme of work.

Making things

Block-based programming

Instead of typing instructions you drag labelled blocks and clip them together. Blocks only fit where they make sense, so nothing fails over a misspelled word. That removes the typing problem, not the thinking: sequence, repetition, conditions and variables are all still there.Pocket Code works this way.

The limitation usually left out: blocks do not by themselves prepare anyone for typed code. A pupil fluent with blocks still meets a text editor and finds exactly the problems that blocks were built to remove. That transfer has to be taught.

Game-based learning

Learning a subject through a game. In the Spanish pilot that meant pupils building the game, with the curriculum content inside the thing they made, and the evaluation reports that teachers assessed the subject rather than the coding. Check which version is meant: much of what is sold under this name is a class playing something an adult designed.

Gamification

Points, badges and leaderboards attached to a task that is otherwise unchanged: the worksheet is still a worksheet, it now awards stars. That is a different mechanism, not a milder version: it works on the willingness to finish a task rather than on the task. Strip out the scoring and see what is left. With gamification, the worksheet. With game-based learning, still a game.

Constructivism

The position that people build understanding rather than receive it, and build it best while making something other people will see. Papert's variant, usually called constructionism, is the one that insists on the shareable artefact, and the two words get used interchangeably more often than they are distinguished. Game-making sits in that tradition, which is visible in the pilot's design but not claimed in the paper.

Computational thinking

Shorthand for a cluster of habits: breaking a problem into parts, noticing patterns, ignoring detail that does not matter, writing a procedure precise enough for something else to follow. As a description of what you want pupils doing, it is useful.

It is also contested, and fairly. Much of it is general problem-solving with a computing label attached, rival frameworks list different components, and nobody agrees how to measure it. When a product claims to develop it, there is rarely a test that could have shown it failed. Read the term as a statement of intent, not as evidence of an outcome.

Scaffolding

Support around a task so a learner manages what they could not manage alone: a worked example, a part-built project, a question at the right moment. The part everyone forgets is in the metaphor. Scaffolding comes down. Support that stays all year is not scaffolding, it is the design of the task. So the question is never what help to give, but what will tell you they no longer need it. Half-finished games are one form of it.

Remix

Opening somebody else's project, taking it apart and changing it. In block-based environments this is normal practice, not a loophole, and it is learning rather than copying: you read working code, form a theory about which part does what, change it, and find out within seconds whether you were right. Copying passes work off as your own; remixing rebuilds in public with the original still visible.

Devices and sensors

Sensor

A component that measures something and hands the program a number. The evaluation draws a distinction worth keeping. A physical sensor is hardware and measures an environmental characteristic directly: accelerometer, gyroscope, proximity. A virtual sensor is software that derives a value by combining several hardware sensors, its Android examples being linear acceleration and gravity. Nothing in the phone measures gravity; that number is worked out. More on that: the phone full of sensors.

Accelerometer and gyroscope

Two things the phone in your pocket already contains. The accelerometer measures acceleration along the device's axes, so it notices tilting, shaking and being carried. The gyroscope measures rotation, so it notices which way the device is turning and how fast. Tilt is the accelerometer, spin is the gyroscope, and the evaluation's own example needs both: combined, they are what makes a racing-game template work, which is steering by tipping the tablet.

BYOD and one-to-one provision

BYOD is bring your own device: pupils work on hardware they already own, which costs a school almost nothing and buys it no uniformity at all. One-to-one is one school-owned device per pupil, identically configured and centrally managed. The difference decides what a teacher can plan: a BYOD lesson has to run on unknown hardware, survive a pupil with nothing in their pocket and need no installation.

The pilot adds a caution across both. Because the school had chosen the apps, pupils treated them as a class resource rather than their own, which the authors give as one reason the ratings came out neutral.

Research vocabulary

User experience evaluation

Asking the people who used something what it was like: practical or not, appealing or not, wanted again or not. It is a real measurement with established instruments, and it is not a measurement of learning. That is why our pilot coverage is worded so carefully. The Spanish evaluation measured acceptance and user experience, not whether anyone learned more mathematics, and no score in it can be turned into a claim that they did. What it did measure is inhow it was rated.

Pragmatic and hedonic quality

The two halves of the AttrakDiff instrument, from Hassenzahl's model, which that evaluation used. Pragmatic quality (PQ) is whether the thing works and can be managed: simple or complicated, clear or confusing, practical or impractical. Hedonic quality is everything else people want, split into identity (HQ-I, whether it lets you show who you are) and stimulation (HQ-S, whether it offers something new to master). Attractiveness (ATT) is rated separately, each across seven word pairs from minus three to plus three. A tool can be pragmatically strong and hedonically flat, which describes most reliable school software.

Pilot and cycle

In an EU research project a pilot is a deployment at a real site under project conditions, evaluated in its own right. No One Left Behind planned three: Spain, the UK, Austria. Acycle is one full run through that plan, here one academic year, after which the tools are revised and it runs again. This project ran two: the first trained pupils and teachers on Pocket Code, the second used Create@School and the teachers' dashboard. So findings from one pilot are not findings from another, and a first cycle is not the same product as a second.

Open access and CC BY

Open access means free to read, with no subscription and no university login. CC BYis a licence: anyone may copy, redistribute and build on the work, including commercially, provided the authors are credited. The Create@School evaluation is open access under CC BY 4.0, which is why we can quote it at length and why reading it on a mirror copy is legitimate rather than a workaround. What we link, and why, is onpublications.