January 2012 Volume 15 Number 1 - Educational Technology ...

Table 2. Participating parents’ profiles
Table 3. Some of the programming tasks solved by a parent-child pair
The three parent-child pairs were observed the whole time while they collaborated in solving the assigned tasks. The
observers used a pre-designed observation sheet to record how a parent and a child collaborated with each other in a
programming session. Three observers rotated every day so that each parent-child pair could be observed by different
observers. With the consent of the participants, all the programming sessions were videotaped so that transcripts
derived from the videotapes could be used to supplement the direct observation data.
On the third day of the camp, the children were given the first hands-on test, in which they had an hour to solve 3
problems. The second test, which contained two problems, was given on the last day of the camp. The children were
required to use the more difficult REPEAT command in the programs they wrote for the second test. The test
problems can be found in Table 5 near the end of this paper. In both tests parents were not allowed to help their
children so that we could assess how well the children had learned.
After completion of the camp, the six participants were interviewed individually. All interviews took place in the
classroom where the camp was held. Each interview lasted approximately 30 minutes. When a parent or a child was
being interviewed, only the interviewer (i.e., the researcher) and the interviewee were in the classroom. We
deliberately separated parents from their children during interviews because we wanted the children to be able to
express their true feelings without possible interventions from their parents. The interviews were semi-structured; in
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