Abstract
Computer Science is nowadays very popular and requested in almost all companies. Many companies would like to have more IT professionals. Therefore we would like to motivate students from the beginning of their education to learn Computer Science, especially programming. There are many educational aids, which could be used for showing students, that programming is not so hard, as they think. The contribution describes our experience with using the online environment Microsoft MakeCode and the most popular educational robot Lego Mindstorms EV3 in an extracurricular activity for primary school children at Matej Bel University, Slovakia. In this paper, we present environment MakeCode and examples of tasks, which we are using for teaching programming in this environment.
Highlights
Children are not very motivated to learning computer science, especially programming
In this paper we focused on using an online environment MakeCode as an alternative to Lego Mindstorms EV3 block programming environment (ROBOLAB)
We showed our tasks for Lego EV3, which we created for developing algorithm thinking of primary school children
Summary
Children are not very motivated to learning computer science, especially programming. The teachers all around the world are trying to motivate them by using special aids such as educational robotics. The most famous brand for kids toys Lego launched their first educational Lego in 1998 - Lego Mindstorms: The Robotics Invention System. Lego Mindstorms is a product of the Danish company LEGO, which has been building kits since 1932. Its name consists of the Danish words "leg godt", which in English can be translated as "play well". The company has an educational component called "LEGO Educational Division", which develops and manufactures construction kits for educational purposes [1]. There are two other generations of Lego Mindstorms: Mindstorms NXT (launched in 2006), and Mindstorms EV3 (launched in 2013)
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