Playful Coding: Towards a Service of Children’s Programming Education

Abstract

The Learn-to-Code movement is important in the information age. But learning programming is difficult for kids. By observing the interactions of instructors and young learners in the “Program the World Association”, this research study how to use game-based strategy to teach kids to learn programming.

Using the method of action research, the research investigated children’s need of learning and the requirements of designing courses. The first three action cycles took place in Ganglin Presbyterian Church in Zuozhen, Tainan. We observed it is difficult for tutors to attend to all children in a class. According to children’s learning efficiency, tutors could give them different challenging tasks to practice. It can help tutors keep their teaching pace in the class. We experienced in grouping children in different types of learning teams and promote them to learn from others. It could avoid children only mimicking the code which is provided by tutors. We encouraged tutors should make children have own target according to their learning efficiency.

We couducted last two action cycles to investigate more needs of a programming course from tutor training. We learned it is necessary to let the new tutors understand what the new concepts are for children and how to deliver them clearly to children with the teaching materials. The tutor training course should enhance the tutor’s confidence. By grouping the teaching group of three types of tutors, we could make tutor enhance each other knowledge and generate the usable teaching strategies in a group discussion.

Through five cycles of action, we summarized practice of “Program the World Association” into the Playful Coding service. We also identified six personas, scenarios, and user journeys to present the service. The main contributions of this research include: (1) to explore game-based strategies to enhance children’s learning, (2) to recruit new talents to deliver the programming knowledge through tutor training, and (3) to formulate the service, Playful Coding, to support tutor’s teaching and children’s learning in friendly environments.