Abstract Book of the 9th International Conference on New Approaches in Education
Year: 2025
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Developing ICT Competencies of Future Preschool Teachers
Nataša Rogulja, Zrinka Vukojević, Mario Dumančić
ABSTRACT:
At the Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Zagreb, first-year early and preschool education students develop their ICT competencies in multimedia, instructional design, and computational thinking. During the “ICT in Education” course in the year 2023, students (N=78) used the Scratch programming language to create digital content for preschool children. Students were divided into two categories (two types of content): in the first category, students (N=39) created their own digital content, and in the second category, students (N=39) adapted existing content from the Khan Academy Kids Mobile App. In the content creation and adaptation process, students applied multimedia and instructional design principles and fulfilled the required technical quality requirements for sound and image processing. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of students’ understanding of the Scratch coding process depending on the type of digital content. The results show no statistically significant differences in the students’ understanding of basic (algorithm; sequence) and complex programming concepts (input values; repetition; selection). The overall results show that 92,3% of students find programming in Scratch language interesting, 91% useful, 9% boring, and 5,1% difficult to master.
Keywords: digital educational content, future pre-school teachers, multimedia and instructional design, ICT competencies, Scratch programming language