Processing Analysis of Swift Playgrounds in a Children’s Computational Thinking Course to Learn Programming

Abstract

Computational thinking courses can cultivate students’ ability to apply logic in the fields of mathematics and information science. The new 12-year Basic Education Curriculum Guidelines were implemented in Fall 2019 in Taiwan. Courses on computational thinking, problem solving, and programming are contained in the technology education field in junior and senior high schools. Swift Playgrounds is an innovative app for the iPad and Mac that makes learning Swift interactive and fun. No programming knowledge is required to use Swift Playgrounds, making it very suitable for beginners. This study was carried out by letting elementary school teachers and students participate in Swift Playgrounds computational thinking courses. By trying this app, teachers of different disciplines attempted to realize more learning situations. Students learned how to cope with functions and loop skills by playing with “Byte”, which is a character in Swift Playgrounds. There were three purposes for this study: first, designing a computational thinking course for the most basic part, “Hello! Byte”, in Swift Playgrounds; second, assigning elementary school teachers to assess the qualitative analysis of tasks in Swift Playgrounds; and third, assigning elementary school students to do the tasks and assign a difficulty index in Swift Playgrounds after learning with this app. The results show that most teachers considered this approach to be able to improve logical thinking and inferential capability after assessing, and most students considered functions and loops quite difficult after using the app. According to the students’ indices, about 86 percent of students considered that adding commands is easy, and about 37 percent of students considered that functions are easy. On the other hand, about 24 percent of students considered that applying the Slotted Stairways is difficult, and about 34 percent of students considered that using loops is hard. It is suggested that more instructions for the course or extendibility for classes is required.