PRACTICE OF COMPUTATIONAL THINKING EDUCATION WITH TEACHING MATERIALS ASSOCIATED WITH THE COMMUNITY

Abstract

It is extremely important for children to acquire the ability to understand and use computers well, no matter what profession they will have in the future. Therefore, in Japan, programming education has become compulsory in elementary schools in the course of study from 2020. Programming education in elementary school teaches computational thinking, not the coding of programming languages as is done in higher education institutions. Furthermore, it aims to motivate children to learn computers by giving them a sense of fun and accomplishment. 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 people are commercially available, there is no teaching material intended for large classes. 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. We have proposed new educational methods that incorporate the strengths of both unplugged programming and physical programming. The new teaching method uses a sticker with robot control instructions (PS: programming sticker), and each child thinks of a procedure for solving problems at his 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. The children can check the operation of the program by running the robot containing the program created by themselves on the actual course.From September 2020, programming education was conducted at all elementary schools in Nonoichi City, which is the local area, using this educational method. In order to attract children's interest and get to know the city well, we created a robot running course for third grade elementary school students in cooperation with the Tourist Product Association in the city. The theme is to create a program that allows robots to go around sweets stores in the city to buy sweets for their family. While looking at the pamphlet created by the Tourism and Products Association, the children researched the sweets and used stickers to program the robot's running course. From the questionnaire results after class, more than 90% answered that they enjoyed this class, and more than 82% answered that they were interested in programming. The following positive opinions were also obtained from elementary school teachers."Children were learning with great fun, and many of them worked hard to solve problems." "It was impressive that children who were not good at studying usually worked on it over and over again." From the above results, it became clear that the new teaching materials produced could be used for programming education for third grade elementary school children.