A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO ARDUINO PROGRAMMING FOR THE PHYSICAL COMPUTING SECTION OF THE INFORMATICS CURRICULUM IN KOREAN MIDDLE SCHOOL

Software education will begin as the public education of South Korea in 2018 since it has been adapted to the national curriculum last year. The curriculum has a goal to achieve three core competencies; information culture literacy, computational thinking, and collaborative problem solving. The curriculum also has four large main areas such as information and culture, data and information, problem solving and programming, and physical computing. The physical computing section has initiated the biggest debate in these days. The reason why it is controversial is because the practice in class is required by using physical computing tools such as Arduino. Teachers are lacking the knowledge of the physical computing tool and its circuit configuration. Therefore, they should prepare the understanding of the hardware parts of the tool. Moreover, they have to choose a practical tool among many physical computing tools and to know how to teach them. In this research, we study the practical way for teaching Arduino programming in the physical computing section so that the new software education curriculum can be implemented properly in the school. We also wish to help teachers clean up their problems to achieve optimum educational effect.