electronics

Article
Novel Scratch Programming Blocks for Web Scraping
Youngki Park 1 and Youhyun Shin 2, *

1 Department of Computer Education, Chuncheon National University of Education, Chuncheon 24328, Korea
2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Incheon National University, Incheon 22012, Korea
* Correspondence: yhshin@inu.ac.kr

Abstract: Although Scratch is the most widely used block-based educational programming language,
it is not easy for students to create various types of Scratch programs based on real-life data because
it does not provide web scraping capabilities. In this paper, we present novel Scratch blocks for web
scraping. Using these blocks, students can not only scrape the contents of HTML elements in a web
page by using CSS selectors but also automate their keyboard and mouse in a number of ways, such
as by using XPaths, the coordinates of the mouse, input strings, keys, or hot keys. We also present file
access blocks that allow students to easily store and retrieve the scraped data in the form of key–value
pairs. We conducted two lectures for a total of 15 primary/secondary school (K-12) teachers, allowing
them to make ten web scraping example applications. As a result of a survey of the teachers, the
proposed web scraping blocks achieved high scores for all evaluation measures.

Keywords: web scraping education; Scratch; Tooee; block-based programming languages; natural
language processing

1. Introduction
Web scraping is an important task for implementing practical applications, because many
Citation: Park, Y.; Shin, Y. Novel real-world problems can be solved by scraping and exploiting real-life data on the web.
Scratch Programming Blocks for Web For example, in order to identify the most common job requirements in the field of med-
Scraping. Electronics 2022, 11, 2584. ical informatics, the job advertisements from a job portal can be scraped [1]. As another
https://doi.org/10.3390/ example, in order to create a movie ranking program, it is necessary to scrape relevant
electronics11162584 information from movie rating websites such as IMDb. In addition, there are numerous
Academic Editor: George Angelos
other programs that require web scraping, such as the COVID-19 dashboard program or
Papadopoulos the weather forecasting program introduced in [2].
These applications can easily be implemented using text-based programming lan-
Received: 12 June 2022 guages such as C++, Java, Python, or JavaScript. On the other hand, it is very hard (or
Accepted: 16 August 2022
impossible) to implement these applications using block-based programming languages
Published: 18 August 2022
such as Scratch [3,4] because these languages do not provide web scraping capabilities.
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral For example, if primary school students who only know how to use Scratch want to create
with regard to jurisdictional claims in a movie ranking program, they must manually scrape the movie data from a movie website
published maps and institutional affil- and hard-code the data into their program. At the time of writing this paper, when using
iations. block-based programming languages students find it difficult not only to create programs
based on real-life data but also to fully achieve data-related computer science learning
objectives (e.g., 1A-DA-05, 1A-DA-06, 1B-DA-06, and 2-DA-08 of the ACM CSTA K-12
Computer Science Standards [5]).
Copyright: © 2022 by the authors.
In this paper, we present novel Scratch programming blocks for web scraping in order
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
to address this problem. With these blocks, students can easily perform web scraping
This article is an open access article
using the block-based programming language. The main contributions of this paper are
distributed under the terms and
as follows:
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// • We describe the limitations of existing block-based programming languages in web
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ scraping. After we briefly introduce block-based programming languages, we describe
4.0/). their web-scraping-related blocks (Section 2).

Electronics 2022, 11, 2584. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11162584 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics

Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 2 of 16

• We present novel Scratch blocks for web scraping. Using these blocks, students can
not only scrape the contents of HTML elements in a web page by using CSS selectors
but also automate their keyboard and mouse in a number of ways, such as by using
XPaths, the coordinates of the mouse, input strings, keys, or hot keys. We also present
file access blocks that can easily store and retrieve the scraped data in the form of
key–value pairs (Section 3).
• We conducted two lectures for a total of 15 primary school teachers, allowing them to
create ten web scraping example applications. We discuss the effectiveness of these
blocks by analyzing the teachers’ survey responses (Section 4).
The main research questions of this paper are as follows:
Research Question 1. Can primary/secondary school students (K-12 students) easily
create practical programs using our web scraping blocks?
Research Question 2. Can primary/secondary school students improve their program-
ming and data literacy skills by implementing web scraping programs using our blocks?

2. Related Work
Many students use block-based programming languages because of the advantage that
the students can easily program by dragging and dropping programming blocks. Two of the
most popular block-based programming languages are Scratch [3,4] and App Inventor [6,7].
As of May 2022, there were about 91,000,000 and 14,900,000 users registered on the Scratch
and App Inventor websites, respectively [8,9]. These programming languages are mainly
used for fostering computational thinking skills [10–19], which can be defined as “thinking
like a computer scientist [20–22]. The block-based programming languages provide the
basic building blocks of programming (such as loops, conditionals, functions, variables,
and lists) so that young students can be used to create practical applications.
Block-based programming languages (especially Scratch) provide only a limited num-
ber of blocks, to make programming easier for students. This is a great advantage for
students who are new to programming, but for students who are familiar with program-
ming it can be an obstacle to creating their own programs. For example, students cannot
use Scratch to access files on their own computers, nor can they scrape the contents of
Google web pages.
There have been many approaches to addressing this problem, and the most common
way is to provide additional blocks. For example, as shown on the left of Figure 1, Cogn-
imates [23] provides blocks for scraping Twitter data. As another example, as shown on
the right of Figure 1, Machine Learning for Kids [24] provides blocks for scraping Wikipedia
data and blocks for scraping Twitter data. Obviously, these blocks are designed to be
intuitive and easy for students to use. However, these approaches still have a limitation
in that students cannot use these blocks to scrape data from websites other than Twitter
or Wikipedia.

Figure 1. The existing blocks that can scrape data from Twitter or Wikipedia provided by Cognimates
(on the left) and Machine Learning for Kids (on the right).

The Entry programming environment (or language) [25] supports web scraping in a
slightly different way. It provides blocks for students to access spreadsheets in the cloud.
In other words, students can use these blocks to obtain or change the value of a specific cell
in the spreadsheets. The environment also provides blocks for automatically drawing charts
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 3 of 16

using a spreadsheet. One advantage of this programming environment is that various types
of data are prepared in advance, so that students do not have to scrape the web themselves.
However, when students create programs using the latest data or data related to their own
interests, they must manually scrape the data themselves.
If there were “general” web scraping blocks that could be used for scraping a user-
specified web page, it would help students to develop their own creative projects. In the
following sections, we present novel web scraping blocks in order to address this problem.

3. Novel Scratch Programming Blocks for Web Scraping

In this section, we present novel programming blocks for web scraping. Our blocks
were built on top of the “Tooee” block interfaces presented in our previous research [2].
In Section 3.1, we briefly introduce these block interfaces. In the following subsections
(Section 3.2 through Section 3.6), we present five types of programming blocks for web
scraping: (1) web scraping blocks, (2) web automation blocks, (3) mouse automation blocks,
(4) keyboard automation blocks, and (5) file access blocks.

3.1. Block Interfaces for Communicating with WebSocket Servers

In our previous research [2], we defined novel Scratch block interfaces for communi-
cating with WebSocket servers that can be implemented using text-based programming
languages such as Python or JavaScript. The main block interfaces are demonstrated in
Figure 2 as follows:
• The first block is the Scratch block that connects a Scratch client to a WebSocket server.
Once connected, the connection continues until the program ends.
• The second and third blocks are the blocks that send messages to WebSocket servers.
In the example shown in the figure, the second block sends the string “the weather” to
the WebSocket server, and the third block sends the two strings “my score” and “10”
to the WebSocket server.
• Whenever the first, second, and third blocks are executed, the Scratch client receives
a response message from the WebSocket server, and the value is stored in the fourth
block of this figure, i.e., “answer from Tooee”.

Figure 2. Scratch block interfaces (named Tooee [2]) for communicating with WebSocket servers. Our
programming blocks were built on top of these block interfaces.

Note that these are just block interfaces, and how these blocks behave depends on
how the WebSocket server is programmed. For example, when we execute the second
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 4 of 16

block in Figure 2, the Scratch client sends the string “the weather” to the WebSocket server.
However, the WebSocket server decides what action the server performs when it receives
this string. Some web servers may be programmed to send the weather in London when
receiving this string, and some other web servers may be programmed to send the weather
in Los Angeles.
Our main idea is that if we can implement a WebSocket server that performs web
scraping tasks based on these block interfaces, then K-12 students should be able to easily
create various types of web scraping applications using these blocks. We describe our
approach in detail in the following subsections.

3.2. Web Scraping Blocks

One way to obtain specific content on a web page is to: (1) fetch the HTML file of
the web page and (2) extract the content of an HTML element using the corresponding
CSS selector. Obviously, if we use Python, we can perform these tasks very easily using
popular libraries such as Selenium and Beautiful Soup. On the other hand, block-based
programming languages such as Scratch cannot perform these tasks, because there are no
corresponding programming blocks.
We implemented a novel WebSocket server in order to address this problem. First,
we assume that Scratch users will send the URL of a web page with the reserved word
“#open”, as follows:
• Tooee, (#open) is (https://dblp.org/)
Whenever the WebSocket server receives two strings and the first string contains
“#open”, the server runs the Chrome web browser and opens the web page specified in the
second string (in this case, https://dblp.org). Here, if the Scratch client and a Python server
are different computers, the client can remotely control the server computer. In order to
prevent unexpected accidents caused by remote control, by default we force the server to
open the web browser only if both the client and server programs run in the same computer.
After opening the web page, a Scratch user can send another request to obtain the
content of a specific HTML element. For example, if the HTML file has <dt id=“blog-
532”><a href=“...”>RDF</a></dt>, then the user can obtain the content “RDF” by sending
the appropriate CSS selector with the reserved word “#scrape”:
• Tooee, (#scrape) is (#blog-532 > a)
Whenever the WebSocket server receives two strings and the first string is “#scrape”,
the server extracts the content of the HTML element using the CSS selector specified in
the second string. After that, the server sends the extracted content to the Scratch client,
and the client stores the content in the Tooee variable “answer from Tooee”.
One of the most difficult tasks for students when using this block is to write the
appropriate CSS selector of a HTML element. Fortunately, the students do not have to learn
how to write the selector, because Chrome Developer Tools provides it automatically. All
the students have to do is simply: (1) press CTRL + SHIFT + C to open the Developer Tools
in Inspect Element mode, (2) click an HTML element, and (3) copy the CSS selector of the
HTML element by right-clicking the selected HTML code. For example, “#blog-532 > a”
can be copied to the clipboard through this process.
Figure 3 shows example Scratch code for scraping a DBLP web page. After running this
code (clicking the Green Flag and pressing the space key), the “answer from Tooee” block
will have the string “RDF”. Note that in this code, the reserved words are encapsulated by
the Scratch variables in order to make it easy for students to use the web scraping blocks.
Here, the variable “URL to open” has “#open”, and the variable “selector to scrape” has
“#scrape”.
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 5 of 16

Figure 3. An example Scratch code for scraping a DBLP web page. When the green flag is clicked,
the Scratch client connects to the WebSocket server and opens the https://dblp.org web page. When
the space key is pressed, the content of the HTML element corresponding to the CSS selector “#blog-
532 > a” is scraped.

3.3. Web Automation Blocks

It can also be helpful for students in scraping various types of websites if “web
automation” blocks are available. For example, assume that students want to scrape news
articles. Because many news websites assign a different URL for each news article, students
need an automatic way of discovering these URLs by clicking suitable HTML elements.
As another example, if a restaurant website provides a dynamic web page, and additional
information appears only when students scroll down the web page, then they also need an
automatic way to scroll down.
In this subsection, we present two web automation blocks. The first block is for
automatically clicking an HTML element, and its block interface is as follows:
• Tooee, (#click) is (XPath)
This block interface is similar to the block interfaces introduced in Section 3.2, ex-
cept that the reserved word is “#click” and XPath is used instead of a URL or a CSS selector.
If a WebSocket server receives two strings and the first string is “#click”, then the server
clicks the HTML element specified in the second string.
The second block is for automatically scrolling down a web page, and its block interface
is as follows:
• Tooee, (#scroll) is (XPath)
Here, only the reserved word is changed. Whenever a WebSocket server receives
“#scroll” as the first string, it scrolls down the web page using the XPath expression described
in the second string. Note that some dynamic web pages are so complex that students need
to scroll down the web page multiple times in order to see a new HTML element.
Figure 4 illustrates an example application using these web automation blocks. Here,
we assume that the web page “https://dblp.org” has already been opened on the browser
by executing the two scripts shown in Figure 3 and that the variable “XPath to click” has
“#click” and the variable “XPath to scroll” has “#scroll”. When the “c” key is pressed,
the WebSocket client sends the two strings “#click” and “//*[@id=“news”]/div/p/a/em”.
When the WebSocket server receives “#click” as the first string, it clicks the HTML element
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 6 of 16

described by the second string. For example, if the HTML file has “<div id=“news” ...><div
...><p><a ...><em>more blog posts</em></a></p></div></div>”, then the anchor text
“more blog posts” will be clicked when the “c” key is pressed. Similarly, when the “down
arrow” key is pressed, the WebSocket server receives the two strings “#scroll” and “/html”.
Because the first string is the reserved word “#scroll”, the server scrolls down the HTML
element described in the second string (in this case, “/html”).

Figure 4. An example program that clicks or scrolls the specified html elements corresponding to
the XPaths.

3.4. Mouse Automation Blocks

The proposed blocks described above are related to handling HTML elements. How-
ever, sometimes we need an automatic way to control the mouse using mouse cursor
coordinates rather than HTML elements. For example, if we want to save an image shown
on the HTML file and there is no button for saving the image, we must place the mouse
cursor on the image and right-click on it.
Therefore, in this subsection, we additionally present novel mouse automation blocks
that use mouse cursor coordinates rather than HTML elements. First, we propose the
following block to discover the current mouse cursor position:
• Tooee, what is (#pos)
Here, we only send the reserved word “#pos”. After executing this block, the current x
and y coordinates of the mouse cursor are stored in the “answer from Tooee” block. For ex-
ample, when the x and y coordinates of the mouse cursor are 1639 and 549, respectively,
the “answer from Tooee” block will have “1639 549” after executing this block. Figure 5
shows example code using these blocks. Here, we assume that the variable “mouse x y”
has “#pos”.
If we know the x and y coordinates, then we can control the mouse by using them, as
in the following blocks:
• Tooee, (#click) is (x y)
• Tooee, (#right) is (x y)
• Tooee, (#double) is (x y)
Here, we denote the x and y coordinates as x and y. When the WebSocket server
receives the reserved word “#click”, it clicks the left mouse button at the position corre-
sponding to the given x, y coordinates. Similarly, the reserved word “#right” indicates
right-clicking the mouse, and the word “#double” indicates double-clicking the mouse.
The block interface for dragging and dropping the mouse is as follows. Here, the re-
served word “#drag” is used, and both the start position (x1 and y1) and the end position
(x2 and y2) must be sent to the WebSocket server.
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 7 of 16

• Tooee, (#drag) is (x1 y1 x2 y2)

Figure 6 shows example code for mouse automation. Here, we assume that the vari-
ables “position to click”, “position to right-click”, “position to double-click”, and “position
to drag-and-drop” have “#click”, “#right”, “#double”, and “#drag”, respectively. Thus,
when we execute this program, it clicks, right-clicks, and double-clicks the mouse on coor-
dinates (1639, 549), and drags and drops the mouse from coordinates (270, 750) to (758, 924).

Figure 5. Example code to discover the current mouse cursor coordinates for mouse automation.
In this example, the “answer from Tooee” block has a value of “1639 549”.

Figure 6. An example program that automates the mouse using the mouse cursor coordinates. In this
example, the program performs a total of 4 operations: (1) “click”, (2) “right-click”, (3) “double-click”,
and (4) “drag-and-drop”.

3.5. Keyboard Automation Blocks

We present two types of blocks for keyboard automation. The first is to enter a key
(including a hot key) using the reserved word “#key”, and the second is to enter a string
using “#input”. The block interfaces of these blocks are as follows:
• Tooee, (#key) is (a key or a hot-key)
• Tooee, (#input) is (a string)
Figure 7 shows example code for keyboard automation. Here, the variables “key to
press” and “string to input” have “#key” and “#input”, respectively. The program code
is executed as follows. First, the two hot keys “CTRL + C” and “CTRL + V” are entered
sequentially. That is to say, if students use a Windows operating system, the currently
selected string is copied and pasted. Second, the string “programming” is entered.
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 8 of 16

Figure 7. Example Scratch code to press the hot keys CTRL + C and CTRL + V and enter the character
string programming.

3.6. File Access Blocks

Scratch does not provide file access blocks by default. However, it is often necessary
to save the scraped data to a file and load it when needed. Thus, we present blocks that
can write and read files. One challenge is to develop a way to make file access easier for
K-12 students.
Our idea is to store students’ data as key–value pairs. Here, keys are unique, and
each key has a corresponding unique value. If a block does not have the aforementioned
reserved words, it is regarded as a file access block. The following block interfaces represent
saving data to a file and loading data from a file, respectively.
• Tooee, (key) is (value)
• Tooee, what is (key)
Figure 8 shows example code for saving and loading data. In this program, when the
s key is pressed, a pair with “title” as the key and “programming” as the value are saved
in the specific file. When l is pressed, the value corresponding to the key “title” is loaded
from the file and stored in the “answer from Tooee” variable.

Figure 8. An example program for storing and retrieving data in the form of key–value pairs.
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 9 of 16

4. Experiments
4.1. Experimental Setup
We conducted two lectures for K-12 teachers. The curriculum for the two lectures
was the same, with six teachers taking the first class and nine teachers taking the second
class. The lectures were held online due to the coronavirus pandemic. A total of 15 online
videos were uploaded, and each video was about 1 h and 15 min long. In these lectures,
teachers communicated through our university’s LMS. Teachers were free to ask questions,
and based on what they had learned, they created their own projects as final assignments
and shared them with each other through the LMS.
In these lectures, teachers were trained to implement the following example applica-
tions using the blocks introduced in Section 3. Note that the fifth, sixth, seventh, ninth, and
tenth applications were inspired by the programs shown in the GitHub repository for data
analysis projects [26]:
1. A “popdog” program using the file access blocks. When a user clicks on a puppy that
appears on the screen, the score is incremented and saved to a file. When the program
is restarted, the score saved in the file is loaded.
2. A coronavirus dashboard program using “#open” and “#scrape”. When the program
starts, it opens the web page on the specific portal site that shows the number of
confirmed coronavirus cases. The program scrapes this number using the appropriate
CSS selector and displays it on the screen.
3. A program that aggregates the weather forecasts from various weather forecast web-
sites using “#open”, “#click”, and “#scrape”.
4. A program that scrapes movie information provided by a movie website and ranks
them based on movie ratings or cumulative audiences using “#open”, “#click”,
and “#scrape”.
5. A program that shows the overall ranking by scraping the rankings of several music
sites using “#open”, “#click”, and “#scrape”. Because the music sites are usually
updated every hour, there is no need to scrape data every time the program is executed.
Therefore, in order to speed up the program execution, it is implemented in such a
way that the scraped data are saved into a file and loaded whenever necessary using
our file access blocks.
6. A program that visualizes the statistics of an online video platform using “#open”,
“#click”, and “#scrape”.
7. A program that visualizes the number of coffee shops of a specific brand by region
using “#open”, “#click”, “#scrape”, and “#scroll”. In the coffee shop website we
scraped, we used both the “#click” and “#scroll” reserved words because we had to
click on several menus sequentially and scroll down to see the information.
8. A program to automatically search and download cat images through a search engine
using “#open”, “#click”, “#right”, “#input”, and “#key”. Here, our mouse automation
blocks are needed to bring up the save menu, and our keyboard automation blocks
are also needed to enter a file name and press the enter key.
9. A program that visualizes the frequencies of hashtags on a specific community website
using “#open”, “#click”, and “#scrape”.
10. A program that scrapes product information for wireless vacuum cleaners from
a specific shopping mall website using “#open” and “#scrape” and recommends
products that meet its user’s requirements.
We conducted an online anonymous survey of teachers after these lectures. Of the
15 teachers, 14 were primary school teachers and one was a secondary school teacher.
Although the primary school teachers did not major in computer science, they were trained
at their universities to teach computer science to primary school students. The survey
consisted of three parts. The first part consisted of questions asking about personal pro-
gramming and educational experience as follows:
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 10 of 16

• How long have you been studying block-based programming languages (such as
Scratch or App Inventor)?
• How long have you been studying text-based programming languages (such as Python
or JavaScript)?
• How long have you been teaching programming to students?
• If you have studied web scraping (or similar topics), briefly describe what you studied.
The second part consisted of the following questions asking how effective our blocks
are from the perspective of K-12 students. The first three questions are related to Research
Question 1 presented in Section 1, and the last two questions are related to Research
Question 2:
• Question 1. Do you think K-12 students could implement these web scraping programs
easily?
• Question 2. Do you think K-12 students will be interested in these web scraping
programs?
• Question 3. Do you think these web scraping programs are practical programs?
• Question 4. Do you think it will be helpful for K-12 students to improve their pro-
gramming skills by implementing these web scraping programs?
• Question 5. Do you think it will be helpful for K-12 students to improve their data
literacy skills by implementing these web scraping programs?
In order to verify the effectiveness of our blocks, we compared our blocks with the
Entry spreadsheet blocks. Thus, the third part consisted of questions asking how effective
the Entry spreadsheet blocks were in terms of the five evaluation measures. Before asking
these questions, we introduced the official example applications that exploit the Entry
spreadsheet blocks. We did not consider Machine Learning for Kids or Cognimates in this
survey, because these programming environments provide very few example applications
related to web scraping.
Note that the questions were designed for responses on a five-point Likert scale
(strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree), and teachers freely ex-
pressed their opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of these blocks. The survey results
are described in the next subsection.

4.2. Experimental Results

All teachers who attended the lectures responded to our anonymous survey. Figure 9
summarizes the teachers’ programming and educational experiences. As shown in Figure 9,
most of the teachers (13 out of 15) had experience in studying both block-based and text-
based programming languages. Of the two remaining teachers, one teacher had experience
with only text-based programming languages, and the other teacher had experience with
only block-based programming languages. In addition, many teachers (11 out of 15) had
experience in teaching programming to their students. All teachers responded that they
had no web scraping experience before attending the lectures. However, some teachers
responded that they had a great deal of experience with other programs that manipulate
data, such as Entry, Scratch, Machine Learning for Kids, and Teachable Machine. One
teacher had experience with data visualization using Tableau.
Table 1 shows the experimental results comparing the Entry spreadsheet blocks and
our web scraping blocks in terms of ease of use (question 1), degree of interest (question 2),
practicality (question 3), programming skills (question 4), and data literacy (question 5).
Here, the numbers outside parentheses represent means, and numbers inside parentheses
represent standard deviations. For example, our blocks had a mean score of 4.87 and a
standard deviation of 0.35 for the third question.
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 11 of 16

Years of Block-based Programming Experience

10

# Teachers
5
8
1 2 2 2
0
none less than 0.5 0.5 to 1 1 to 2 more than 2
Years of Text-based Programming Experience
10
# Teachers

5
8
1 2 1 3
0
none less than 0.5 0.5 to 1 1 to 2 more than 2

Years of Programming Teaching Experience

10
# Teachers

5
4 4 5
2 0
0
less than 1 1 to 3 3 to 5 5 to 10 more than 10

Figure 9. Summary of the teachers’ programming and educational experience.

Table 1. Experimental results comparing the Entry spreadsheet blocks and our web scraping blocks
for the five evaluation measures. Numbers outside parentheses represent means, and numbers inside
parentheses represent standard deviations.

Evaluation Measure Entry Spreadsheet Blocks Our Web Scraping Blocks p-Value
Ease of Use 3.47 (0.99) 3.73 (0.96) 0.24821
Degree of Interest 4.07 (0.96) 4.27 (0.88) 0.17971
Practicality 4.33 (1.05) 4.87 (0.35) 0.03389 **
Programming Skills 4.87 (0.35) 4.93 (0.27) 1.00000
Data Literacy 4.73 (0.59) 4.86 (0.53) 0.31731
** p ≤ 0.05.

We performed a Wilcoxon signed-rank test with an alpha level of 0.05. The experi-
mental results (Figure 10) show that our web scraping blocks did not show a statistically
significant difference compared to the Entry spreadsheet blocks, except for the practicality
evaluation measure. However, note that our blocks all showed higher average scores
for all evaluation measures. In particular, our blocks showed very high scores (over 4.8
points) for the third, fourth, and fifth evaluation measures. A more detailed analysis of the
experimental results is presented in the next section.
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 12 of 16

Do you think K-12 students can implement

these Web Scraping programs easily?
10

# Teachers
5
7
0 2 3 3
0
strongly disagree neutral agree strongly
disagree agree
Do you think K-12 students will be interested in
these Web Scraping programs?
10
# Teachers

5
6 7
0 1 1
0
strongly disagree neutral agree strongly
disagree agree

Do you think these Web Scraping programs are

practical programs?
15
# Teachers

10
5 13
0 0 0 2
0
strongly disagree neutral agree strongly
disagree agree

Do you think it will be helpful for K-12 students to

improve their programming skills by
implementing these Web Scraping programs?
15
# Teachers

10
5 13
0 0 0 2
0
strongly disagree neutral agree strongly
disagree agree

Do you think it will be helpful for K-12 students to

improve their data literacy skills by
implementing these Web Scraping programs?
15
# Teachers

10
5 13
0 0 1 1
0
strongly disagree neutral agree strongly
disagree agree

Figure 10. The teachers’ evaluation results for the proposed programming blocks from the five
perspectives.
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 13 of 16

4.3. Analysis of Results

In this subsection, we analyze the survey responses in detail. We describe in detail
the evaluation scores given by the teachers, and also show their comments on our web
scraping blocks.
• Question 1. Do you think K-12 students can implement these web scraping programs
easily?
A total of 10 out of the 15 teachers stated that K-12 students would be able to easily
create web scraping programs. More specifically, the teachers stated that it would be easier
for K-12 students to perform web scraping with a block-based programming language
instead of Python. They also stated that the proposed web scraping blocks were intuitive
to use.
One teacher answered “neutral” to this question, expressing the opinion that although
primary school students would find it difficult to create these applications, secondary
school students could easily create them. On the other hand, one teacher who answered
“strongly agree” presented the opposite opinion, stating that the proposed blocks were
suitable for primary school students in grades four, five, and six.
The teachers who answered “agree” described their reasons for not answering “strongly
agree” as follows. (1) Firstly, while the proposed blocks are easy to use, a high level of
Scratch programming skill is required for students to create the example applications.
(2) Secondly, while there are websites where web scraping can be performed easily, there
are also websites where it is very difficult to perform web scraping. Therefore, it would be
better if the teachers had a high level of programming skill, in order to help their students
easily. (3) Lastly, the teachers described external obstacles such as computers in their
schools that were too slow to use the Scratch programming language.
We give the additional comments of the teachers below:
“After taking this class, I personally conducted a web-scraping-based program-
ming class for primary school students in grades 1–3. At first, some students
found web scraping quite difficult. I think it will be easy for primary school
students in grades 4–6 to learn web scraping.”
“The web scraping blocks seem easier because they are simpler and more intuitive
than the Entry spreadsheet blocks.”
“Because data are scraped in a block programming language rather than a difficult
language such as Python, I think students will be able to program with interest.”
“The advantage of the web scraping blocks is that students are free to scrape
data by using them. However, the difficulty of programming will vary greatly
depending on which websites the students scrape. If the blocks are used in a
classroom setting, a teacher’s guidance is required.”
“It seems that students should have basic programming skills, and rather than
just getting them to start programming right away, it seems necessary to explain
to them what the web scraping process is and how they can use it.”
• Question 2. Do you think K-12 students will be interested in these web scraping
programs?
To this question, most teachers (13 out of 15) answered “agree” or “strongly agree”.
The teachers stated that they expected to elicit their students’ voluntary participation,
because the students can scrape the real-life data they want on their own. The teachers also
described that the proposed blocks allowed students not only to scrape data but also to
visualize it in a fun way.
We give the additional comments of the teachers below:
“I think that this educational material has the advantage of easily collecting data
and visualizing it in an interesting way.”
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 14 of 16

“The web scraping blocks have the huge advantage of allowing students to scrape
their own fields of interest. I think it’s great that students can get the latest data
they want.”
“Web scraping blocks can generate explosive interest from students and have the
advantage of automating data collection.”
• Question 3. Do you think these web scraping programs are practical programs?
All teachers agreed with this question, and 13 out of 15 teachers strongly agreed.
Most of the teachers answered that our example applications are practical because they
are very relevant to “real life” and use “real data” and “real-time data”. One teacher
suggested that it would be easier to create practical programs if additional blocks to
automate visualization were presented. Another teacher responded that if additional
educational materials for teachers were provided, they would be better able to guide
students in creating practical programs.
We give the additional comments of the teachers below:
“I think it’s good that educational materials using web scraping blocks are closely
related to our real life.”
“The web-scraping-based programs are more practical than the Entry-spreadsheet-
based programs because they are more relevant to our real life.”
“The Entry spreadsheet blocks are suitable for learning the basic principles of data,
and web scraping blocks have the advantage of being able to utilize real-life data
and real-time data.”
• Question 4. Do you think it will be helpful for K-12 students to improve their pro-
gramming skills by implementing these web scraping programs?
When we asked the teachers if creating these web scraping programs would help
students improve their programming skills, 13 out of 15 teachers responded that they
would be very helpful. There were two teachers who answered “agree” instead of “strongly
agree”, one with no block-based programming experience and the other with less than six
months of block-based programming experience. Through this result, it can be inferred
that the proposed blocks are more effective for teachers (or students) with a great deal of
experience in using block-based programming languages.
• Question 5. Do you think it will be helpful for K-12 students to improve their data
literacy skills by implementing these web scraping programs?
Most of the teachers (13 out of 15) answered that they strongly agreed with this
question. The teachers responded that the proposed blocks would be very effective for
data literacy education in that students could scrape data in their field of interest on their
own and interpret the scraped data from various perspectives. Two teachers responded
“neutral” or “agree”, and they had no, or less than six months of, experience with block-
based programming languages. Therefore, it is expected that data literacy education will
be more suitable for teachers (or students) with more than six months of block-based
programming experience.
One teacher commented on this question as follows:
“It is essential to collect data for training artificial intelligence models. Therefore,
I believe that web scraping is an area of data literacy that is essential for the future
society in which students will live.”

4.4. Limitations of the Study

One limitation of this paper is that, as a result of the experiments, the p-values exceeded
0.05 in four out of the five evaluation measures. Although our blocks achieved higher
average scores for all five evaluation measures, it will be necessary to conduct additional
experiments by increasing the number of participants. Another limitation is that teachers
gave relatively low scores for the “ease of use” evaluation measure compared to the
Electronics 2022, 11, 2584 15 of 16

other evaluation measures. Since the teachers predicted that children in early primary
school would find our web scraping blocks difficult to use, it will be necessary in future
work to develop easier web scraping blocks, so that even very young students can easily
exploit them.

5. Conclusions
In this paper, we presented novel Scratch programming blocks for web scraping.
The blocks include not only web scraping blocks that can open specific web pages and
scrape the contents of specific HTML elements using CSS selectors but also web automation
blocks that can click or scroll specific HTML elements using XPaths. We also presented
mouse and keyboard automation blocks. The mouse automation blocks consist of a block
that discovers the current mouse cursor coordinates and blocks that can click, right-click,
double-click, and drag-and-drop using the given mouse cursor coordinates. The keyboard
automation blocks include a block that allows a key or a hot key to be pressed and a block
that allows a character string to be entered. We also presented intuitive file access blocks
that can store and retrieve data in the form of key–value pairs, enabling the reuse of data
obtained through web scraping.
We conducted web scraping education using the proposed blocks through two sets of
lectures over three weeks for a total of 15 teachers. The teachers created a total of ten web
scraping applications through the lectures. Most of the teachers expected these blocks to be
very effective in teaching web scraping to K-12 students. Based on the evaluation results
from the teachers’ responses, we draw the following conclusions. (1) It is expected that
students will be able to easily create practical programs by using our web scraping blocks
(Research Question 1). The teachers gave very high scores for the “practicality” of our blocks
compared to the existing blocks (p = 0.03389). In addition, they agreed that our blocks were
difficult for children in early primary school to use but not for upper-grade primary school
students or secondary school students. (2) In addition, these blocks are expected to help
improve students’ programming and data literacy skills (Research Question 2). Surprisingly,
all teachers with more than six months of block-based programming experience “strongly
agreed” that K-12 students could build their programming and data literacy skills through
creating our web scraping applications.
As far as we know, this is the first study intending to perform web scraping using
a block-based programming language and the first paper on web scraping education for
K-12 students. Therefore, there is a shortage of relevant educational materials that teachers
can use to guide their students. As future work, we plan to develop various types of
educational materials using our proposed blocks and release them on the http://tooee.org
website. In addition, since our research did not show statistically significant results for
four of the evaluation measures due to the small number of participants, we also plan to
re-validate the experimental results through additional surveys.

Author Contributions: conceptualization, Y.P. and Y.S.; data curation, Y.P.; investigation, Y.P. and
Y.S.; methodology, Y.P. and Y.S.; supervision, Y.S.; validation, Y.P. and Y.S.; writing—original draft, Y.P.
and Y.S.; writing—review and editing, Y.P. and Y.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published
version of the manuscript.
Funding: This work was supported by an Incheon National University Research Grant in 2020.
This research was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research
Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2020R1I1A3068836).
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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