Abstract:

In Japan, programming education will be compulsory at elementary schools from fiscal 2020. The programming education in elementary school does not learn programming language coding as we do in higher education institutions, but it does learn programming thinking. However, there are some problems in introducing programming education in elementary school.

Japanese elementary schools have 30 to 35 children per class, and one teacher must be in charge of one class. Although programming materials used by a small number of children are commercially available, there is no teaching material intended for large classes. In addition, elementary schools do not have sufficient budget for facilities such as ICT (Information and Communication Technology) devices and robots including personal computers, and there is no programming skill or know-how to teach elementary school teachers to children. In order to conduct programming education throughout the school and society as a whole, in order to solve the above problems, new teaching materials with low capital investment and regardless of the programming skills of teachers are required.

On the other hand, it is easy to think that programming needs to be learned on a computer, but if you want students to gain a deeper understanding of the concept of the program instead of operating the program blindly, learning in the unplugged form is effective. Furthermore, the unplugged type has features such as low facility budget and easy to carry out lessons in the classroom. However, there is a problem that children get bored faster than physical programming methods that use robots. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a new educational method that makes use of the features of both unplugged type and physical type.

A new teaching method uses a sticker with robot car control instructions (PS: programming sticker), and each child thinks of a procedure for solving problems at his / her desk and applies a sticker to control the robot according to the procedure.

The PS is a special sticker that can be attached and removed any number of times, and can be programmed by the child in trial and error. Next, when the sheet with PS attached is read by the image scanner, it is automatically encoded and the control instruction is transferred to the robot car. The children can check the operation of the program by running the robot car containing the program created by themselves on the actual course. The operation is simple from scanning to moving the robot car, and it can be performed only by children without the help of teachers. Therefore, an elementary school teacher can give lessons in the form of 1 (teacher) vs. N (the number of children).

In order to confirm that the developed teaching materials can be used in elementary schools, we used the teaching materials to actually carry out several classes in the second grade, third grade and fourth grade of elementary school in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. As results, it became clear that children can carry out from program creation to robot operation without being confused by stickers, image scanners and robot car operations. From the questionnaire results after class, more than 90% answered that they enjoyed this class, and more than 85% answered that they were interested in programming. From the above results, it became clear that the new educational method we developed could be used for programming education for elementary school children.

Keywords:

Programming education, elementary school, programming with stickers.