Using Pirate Plunder to develop children’s abstraction skills in Scratch

Scratch users often struggle to detect and correct ‘code smells’ (bad programming practices) such as duplicated blocks and large scripts, which can make programs difficult to understand and debug. These ‘smells’ can be caused by a lack of abstraction, a skill that plays a key role in computer science and computational thinking. We created Pirate Plunder, a novel educational block-based programming game, that aims to teach children to reduce smells by reusing code in Scratch. This work describes an experimental study designed to measure the efficacy of Pirate Plunder with children aged 10 and 11. The findings were that children who played the game were then able to use custom blocks (procedures) to reuse code in Scratch, compared to non-programming and programming control groups.