Pixel International Conferences

There has been much criticism of the lack of programming in secondary level ICT teaching provision in Northern Ireland. According to InvestNI, a local funding agency that supports small businesses and potential start-ups, Northern Ireland is the leading foreign direct investment region in Europe for software development and IT technical support centres. There are more than 900 companies in the ICT sector and many of these are international organisations. It is against this backdrop that we need to promote secondary level programming education and to do so, we ran three separate 3-day interactive workshops (outside of classroom time) in three different schools covering different demographics, under a funded project entitled Widening Access Robotics Programming (WARP). The aim was to give the students a feel for what they would be doing when studying both Software Systems Development and other STEM subjects in Higher Education (HE) in a fun and novel way. This was achieved by learning industry standard programming languages (e.g., Java) and using it to program a Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot. This visual demonstration inspired students to learn programming and helped students understand programming in a practical manner. The students rapidly progressed through the content and gained a lot of hands on experience. A feedback sheet combining a Minute Paper and Happy Sheet was used to evaluate the students’ overall impression and provide feedback on areas requiring further attention. Following analysis of the Likert scale using a happy face to represent positive, a neutral face to represent neutral and a sad face to represent negative feedback, the quantitative feedback from the students showed that no students were unhappy with the course, 12% had neutral feelings and 88% of students were positive about their learning throughout the course. The qualitative feedback evidenced the practical aspect of coding the robot was inspiring and a strong learning aid including some comments such as they learned “how to create and write code and watch how a robot can be programmed”.

Keywords: Interactive learning, Programming, Robotics, Widening Access.

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