Abstract:

The 21st century is often referred to as the information age. Technologies are evolving rapidly, making it difficult for us to stay up to day. We are in a digital world. Almost everything is based on computers. Obviously, this situation must be reflected in schools. What and how to teach in schools to prepare students for everyday computer work is a question we have been trying to answer since the advent of personal computers. There is no doubt that such training is necessary, but the content and form of teaching had change over the years. However, it does not always evolve for the better. The use of computers in schools, combined with school equipment, teacher training and pupils' skills, has an impact on the educational process. Last but not least, the curriculum also influences this process.

Since 2014, the trend is to teach programming in schools. We can follow this development in most countries of the world, in the United Kingdom, in the United States of America and also in the Czech Republic. Schools are coping with this trend in different ways and not always successfully. In this article, I would like to present my experience with teaching programming at a primary school in the Czech Republic. I have many years of experience teaching programming at both university and high school. I started teaching programming at primary school last year and my experience with teaching pupils aged 10 - 15 exceeded expectations. Learning a programming language can be a way for a child to express themselves. Some children have different problems in reading and writing and they may overcome it in coding. Coding can be useful in developing children's thinking. It develops problem-solving, critical and sequential thinking and helps build stronger communication. Coding may not be a burden for children if we focus on the interests of the child than on teaching coding what may become a necessary evil.

In my article, I will present the individual steps that my teaching has gone through. At the beginning, I tried to approach programming with the help of ozobots robots. After a month, I switched to teaching programming in Python. However, this teaching did not entertain all students. The next step was programming in Scratch, and the students were thrilled. Scratch is a graphical programming language that allows very intuitive creation of programs that suit to students. In the article I will describe the teaching methodology, advantages and disadvantages of this approach, I will give good and bad examples and projects of students. In conclusion, I will summarize the experience as teacher and experience of pupils.

Keywords:

Coding in schools, Python programming, Scratch, ozobot, programming methodology for pupils.