Can a Learning Companion Be Used to Continue Teaching Programming to Children Even During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Abstract

Learning how to program in Primary Education has attracted significant research in recent years. It is unclear though how programming environments and languages should be adapted to children to achieve better learning and use, but one trend seems to be the use of Scratch. The question in this paper is what programming environment can be used to continue teaching programming to children who have already been taught Scratch for years. This paper's proposal is that students aged between 10 and 12 can benefit from interacting with a friendly learning companion using p-code such as Alcody. The hypothesis is that students (aged between 10 and 12) with a knowledge of Scratch will be able to significantly improve their scores by using a learning companion to teach them how to program even during the COVID-19 pandemic. To check the hypothesis, an experiment was carried out during the 2019/2020 academic year with 137 students in Ecuador. A significant improvement in the scores of the students was recorded together with high satisfaction.

Can Mindfulness Help Primary Education Students to Learn How to Program With an Emotional Learning Companion?

“…In [15], it was reported how Alcody was used by 137 students aged between 10 and 12 with previous programming knowledge in Scratch in their transition to learning textual programming for ten months. Students were able to significantly increase their learning scores in a prepost test on writing programs covering the input/output concept from 0.88 in the pre-test up to an average score of 8.01 in the post-test, and the conditions concept from 0.98 in the pre-test up to 6.97 in the post-test using a 0 (minimum) up to 10 (maximum) scale.…”

“…In this section, Alcody is described as with our previous research [15]. A demonstration of Alcody can be used online at alcody.site with the username "diana" and the password "123".…”

“…Learning companions can empathize with children as they have anthropomorphic features with a head, body and limbs. It is particularly relevant that the companion has a face to show emotions and to accompany the students, and a calm state to help students to study on-line at home in the current COVID-19 pandemic [15].…”

“…Almost half the students were girls. All had already used Alcody during the 2019/2020 academic year to learn about sequencing, memory, input/output, and conditionals with a significant increase in their learning scores and a positive attitude to the system [15].…”

“…However, there is still little evidence on how to design successful coding experiences for children according to their age, attitude and needs [11]. In our previous work [15], an emotional learning companion called Alcody co-designed with children between 10-12 years old was presented to explore the possibility of applying Papert's constructionism ideas of helping children to reach their own solution by programming in an environment adapted to their age, attitude and needs.…”