A Study on Developmentally Appropriate Programming Education Learning Materials for Lower-Elementary School Students

Abstract

In Japan, programming education will be introduced in the Courses of Study for Elementary School from FY2020. Although various studies have been conducted on this topic, very few have examined Japanese elementary school computational thinking in terms of the developmental stages of elementary school children. Thus, we developed programming learning materials using concrete objects that can be understood by lower-elementary students. Specifically, we divided program-oriented thinking into three steps: concrete, logical, and abstract thinking; we then made the pupils carry out work in this order to encourage them to think of the sequence of actions necessary to implement the intended act, which involved the measurement and control of an illumination system. Furthermore, we discuss the validity of the proposed material based on questionnaire results of student participants and their parents of a workshop.

Technology-Integrated Computing Education in Early Childhood: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In the second round, the 50 articles were reviewed in full text. We did not set specific criteria for assessing methodological rigor as there is no consensus on how quality assessment should be operationalized in literature reviews (Xiao & Watson, 2019), but we did exclude studies that did not report participant characteristics, data collection and analysis method (e.g., Kawada et al, 2019, was excluded). Overall, 19 articles were excluded because: a).…”

“…Theoretically, they can acquire foundational computing skills such as sequencing and recognizing patterns via the use of symbolic tools or simple words (Saxena et al, 2020). Informed by Piaget’s perspectives, existing studies found that concrete objects and hands-on activities are instrumental in promoting children’s engagement in computing and CT development (e.g., Yang et al, 2021; Kawada et al, 2019).…”