The Prototype of a Story Book Based Platform for Preschool Programming Education

Abstract

The importance of learning how to program can never be over-estimated. Even though there are already programming-learning applications for young children, most of the applications in this field are designed for children in the elementary school age or even above. Teaching younger children, for example, preschool kids, how to program appears more challenging. From our survey, it appears that even preschool kids can understand how to do programming and the question is simply which tools to use. Preschool kids usually start their reading from picture books. They learn mathematics, arts, histories, and a lot of knowledge with picture books. The goal of this research is to propose a platform for story tellers, illustrators, and programming education experts to cooperate to build picture books to teach preschool kids how to program. At this very initial stage, the platform is developed as a Web application and hence it can be easily accessed by various devices via Web browsers. The platform consists of a lean story editor, a picture book editor, and a programming concept editor.