Creating a fairy tale through computer coding: a didactic experiment with Scratch

Abstract

This study examines the repercussions of computer coding activities, introduced several years ago in the Italian schools, for linguistic education. In particular, the article describes an experiment conducted in a lower secondary school, where a fairy tale, which had already been analysed by Propp as a linguistic algorithm, was coded in its single events by using a programming language with blocks in the programming environment Scratch. Subsequently, the instructions contained in the source code in blocks were “translated” into Italian and turned into a narrative by the students.