Teaching Programming Concepts to Elementary Students

Educators and parents alike are seeking innovative ways to introduce young students to computer programming. The hope is to capture children's attention and foster learning at the same time. The goal of this work was to not only introduce elementary students to the fundamentals of computer programming, but also help them explore more complex concepts in an engaging way. Studies have shown that factors that inspire children's continued interest can sometimes vary by gender at this age; this work specifically addresses how to incorporate elements that will appeal to these potential differences in motivation. This study describes the design and implementation of a computer microworld game designed to introduce the core constructs and techniques of computer programming. By instructing a virtual robot to complete obstacle courses, students become familiar with core programming concepts such as: algorithms, repetition, conditional logic, debugging, functions, and optimization. We conducted several interactive sessions with a group of elementary school students in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the game. Our results showed the game effectively familiarized students with both computer language constructs and the essentials of algorithmic thinking. Students were quickly able to learn core-programming concepts and apply these concepts to free form solutions.