Abstract:

With the advancement of the today’s society, children are expected to grow as “creative thinkers.” Creation activity with computer programming would be an effective approach for children to cultivate their creative thinking ability by working on their meaningful projects of their interests. However, in our experience organizing programming workshops using visual programming environments such as Scratch for over ten years, many of children face a difficulty in programming for what they want to create. Although learning programming itself is not be a major purpose for such programming workshops, it is necessary to build an environment such that children can acquire some level of programming skills required to make programs.

In this paper, we will present a set of materials to learn fundamental programming concepts on Scratch for children who have an initial experience on building a project. These materials are based on a method of the inductive learning process, which encourages children to make a solution to a given goal after examining several examples. For an example to learn what the number on the “move XX steps” block means, the material shows two examples of scripts which have the different numbers for “XX” with the movement of the sprite on the stage. Children are expected to find out the difference in the example scripts and understand that the number indicated on the block changes the speed of the movement of the sprite. Then children will apply what they obtained through these examples to make a program to achieve a given requirement such as “making the sprite move faster than the first example.” Other examples of materials include “conditional branching”, “repeating” and “arithmetic.”

We have also developed a Web-based system to show these materials. Each of the Web page illustrates the examples to understand the programming concept and the requirement for which children try to apply their understanding. Examples are shown with a visual image of scripts and an embedded stage to see how the script works. The embedded stage is linked to a Scratch project hosted on the Scratch website, with which children can examine the project of examples without losing the tinkerability and liveliness of the important features of Scratch.

Keywords:

Programming, Learning material, Web-based system, Inductive learning, Visual programming environment.