RUME 28
2026
Alexandria, Virginia
Interpreting Student Code: Prospective Teachers’ Scripted Responses to a Scratch Coding Task
Page: 28
We explore prospective intermediate and secondary school teachers’ strategies for supporting students in coding and troubleshooting errors while working in Scratch ©. Participants were asked to create an imagined dialogue that addressed student-generated “starter” code, which included bugs, in order to explore the probability of different sums of two dice rolls and present these sums as a graph. Our analysis shows that participants attended to different possible student difficulties with the coding, yet few of them attended to the given starter code as an instance of student thinking when suggesting viable resolutions or ways forward. Instead, participants tended to introduce their own approaches and trajectories for how to advance the code. We suggest that while participants demonstrated useful teaching strategies to support student-characters, their attention was focused on advancing any code, rather than building with or on ideas presented by the student-characters.