Abstract:

Both teaching and learning programming is challenging. At the same time, many researchers suggest beginning teaching the basics of programming to children as early as possible. For example, programming is introduced as part of an elementary school's first-grade elective informatics course in Croatia. However, high expectations combined with difficulties during learning decrease motivation. For that reason, instead of motivating students to engage with programming as a skill required for a future occupation, they tend to give up. Therefore, it is imperative to choose a programming language and a development environment suitable for students' age. However, when teaching preschool and early school children the basics of programming, choosing a programming language and development environment is not enough since learning has to be fun. The teacher has to increase students' intrinsic motivation, leading to more active participation in teaching, which is essential to achieve good results during the learning process. This paper provides an example of a didactic tool developed and used for teaching programming by using gamification. Since we are talking about teaching programming preschool and early school children, the additional challenge is that they still have to develop reading skills. Taking all mentioned above, we have decided to use tangible programming as it allows students to learn the basics of programming and computational thinking without knowing the syntax of programming languages and without the use of computers. The main advantage of the presented tool is that the teacher or an enthusiastic parent can make it with minimum cost and effort. A web application was developed to support teachers during the teaching process, enabling them to present a problem solution to each student or whole class. The application also stores teaching scenarios used for teaching and emphasising various programming concepts.

Keywords:

Tangible programming, learning programming, computational thinking.