Abstract:

Nowadays, it is very difficult to motivate young people to learning computer science. Many times we can hear in our country that employees working in the field of computer science are well-paid above the average. Nevertheless, there is still a deficiency and it does not cause enough motivation to learn this field. Sometimes just hearing “programming“ is a demotivation itself. We would like to refute the opinion that programming is not funny. In our mind, one of possible solutions could be robots which are able to be programmed through simple programming languages. Many researches show that using robots in the process of teaching programming increase motivation, logical and algorithmic thinking of students. The article deals with the programmable robot Phiro Unplugged PRO which is suitable for educational purposes within programming. Phiro Pro offers five different ways of programming depending on difficulty - simple sequential programming, swish cards, Scratch, Phiro Code, and Snap4Arduino. The article presents our experiences with using Phiro Pro Unplugged to teaching programming at our extracurricular activity at the Department of Computer Science at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica.

Keywords:

Programming, robots, STEM, Phiro Pro.