Pixel International Conferences

Elementary school pupils are interacting with mobile applications and technology on a daily basis and are considered as digital native generation. Behind the development of such applications, there is a lot of hard work in programming that involves among other things skills in programming and skills in algorithmic thinking. Learning programming is not easy for all students and neither for children. Programmers use mathematics, science, design, technology, and art to create their products. Thus, the understanding of the STEM concepts will help in designing new computer programs and applications. Furthermore, it is clear that in today's modern world coding is a basic skill and is especially important in STEM. In recent years, several academic institutions and companies have made much effort in developing web-based learning platforms to facilitate the teaching and learning of the foundations of computer science and programming. Most of these online programming platforms are free, interactive and user-friendly as well as supported with rich multimedia features. They have become easy to use, very attractive and helpful for teaching children how to code, during school and after school, but they are not based on comprehensive methodologies so that, the fundamentals of coding can be easily understood by pupils. The current research examined the teaching of a programming course to elementary school pupils, after school, based on the following three online interactive environments: "Plastelina" for logic games, “Code with Anna and Elsa” via the Hour of Code project, which is a Blockly programming environment, and "Turtle Academy" for textual programming based on the Logo language. The research included the development, implementation and evaluation of the course, which comprised of 13 meetings, total of 26 hours, taught to 41 pupils of 4th and 5th grades at two elementary schools in the center of Israel. The teaching and learning approaches that have been combined in this course were mainly game-, problem- and project-based approaches. In addition, the research aimed to investigate the pupils' attitudes toward the learning of computer programming, both before and after the participation in the course. Data were collected by means of pre-post attitude questionnaire, written exam, and analysis of the final project and class observations. The findings indicated that the pupils' attitudes towards programming remained positive also after the participation in the course. It was also found that the learning of programming improved children's problem-solving skills, social skills and persistence skills.