Um método para o desenvolvimento de software por crianças com o ambiente scratch

Abstract

The use of digital technologies is commonplace in most people’s daily life and these technologies must be developed aiming the end user and their needs. The Participatory Design provides to the users the direct participation on the development of technologies for their use. The child, as a user, is able to become coauthor through this approach, allied to Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Software Engineering (SE) practices. The Scratch environment provides to the child the direct coauthorship in the development of technologies, because it allows he/she to create part of a software product. When analyzing the related works, it was verified a more educational approach to the use of Scratch, aiming the development of the children’s computational thinking. In none of the investigated work the explicit objective of developing, in a systematic way, a final product with children was observed. This work, therefore, has as its main objective to investigate the integration between HCI and SE in the development of technology, in a systematized way, with/for/by children with the Scratch environment support. It was chosen a qualitative research approach, through two exploratory studies. The preliminary results obtained on the Study 1 indicated that integrating techniques from HCI and SE is effective in the development of technologies with children, but these techniques may require some adaptions for the use with this public. On Study 2, it was offered to the children a wider contact with the Scratch environment, prior to the Requirement Engineering activities, which contributed to those involved by making them to collaborate with more confidence on the definition of a technology and on the development of solutions. The proposal of a method integrating SE and HCI for the development of software by children using the Scratch environment and the games produced during the Studies 1 e 2 are the results of this study. The purposed method may serve as a reference to other experiences on the software development in Scratch environment in partnership with children.