”Vi går in och tittar i mappen” -En lärares språkliga strukturering av rumslighet i programmeringsundervisning

Abstract

Spatial abilities are one of many predictors for students’ learning of programming. This exploratory study aims to investigate how a teacher structure spatiality by means of verbs that indicate motion. Data consists of transcribed talk from YouTube videos that the teacher recorded for teaching purposes. The three most common verbs, surf, drive and go, were chosen for systematic identification of metaphors in scenes. The results indicate that “köra” (‘drive’) has divergent meanings in the context of web server programming, compared to their most basic meaning. However, since “drive” has its specific meaning in the context of programming, the metaphor has been conventionalised. For the verbs “surf” and “go” the metaphoric use indicate a motion into a confound area. The motion has the direction “in” or “out”, which gives some indications of spatiality. Overall, the clues on the spatiality of programming from the teachers’ linguistic utterances are sparce. Implications for education are discussed