Abstract:

To learn programming languages for the upper-grade students of the elementary school students in Taiwan will become a national policy effectively since 2019. It is challenging and thus teachers or researchers are looking for strategies and tools to bridge the initiatory programming education. "King of Pirates (KoP) ", a board game, is thus created for this purpose. In this board game, players arrange and combine “cards” to simulate programming thoughts. It incorporates several concepts of computational thinking in game, includes “sequences”, “loops” and “conditionals” to make player learn these concepts during games. In this initial study, we intended to explore students’ perceptions of KoP and the feasibility of incorporating KoP into learning setting before the students officially start their course of programming languages in the hope that the KoP could become an innovative and an effective instructional and interesting learning method. Eventually, we will be able to make the KoP as a facilitator for its traits of entertainment, strategy, and sociality. To address the issue, we held a learning workshop for the middle-grade (grades 3 & 4) students in an elementary school in Hsin-chu city in northern Taiwan. Forty-three students, including 23 male and 20 female students, participated in this study. They were divided into 11 groups, four students in each group. The whole 4-hour workshop includes three sections, the orientation of the rule introduction, battle modes and puzzle solutions. A five-point Likert scale questionnaire was administrated to all participating students immediately after the workshop. The questionnaire consists of nine questions including their demographic data and computer experience, reflections on using the Kop, and conceptual change of computational thinking. Forty-one valid questionnaires out of the collected forty-three ones were used for data analysis.The results show that most students perceived the KoP to be fun and engaging. They not only had a high willingness towards learning with the KoP, but also agreed it could help them develop programming concepts and computational thinking in the process of gameplay. Overall, the results indicate incorporating KoP into programming instruction would be feasible. After enhancements have been made to the KoP based in the users’ feedback, we will conduct the experiment to examine the effectiveness of using KoP for enhancing coding and programming languages for the upper-grade students in the near future.

Keywords:

Board game, Programming instruction, Computational thinking.