PiktoMir: teaching programming concepts to preschoolers with a new tutorial environment

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new open source environment called PiktoMir (http://www.piktomir.ru/) that allows children to program a virtual robot behavior by using few pictograms. The goal of our research was to investigate the feasibility of using PiktoMir in teaching elements of programming to preschoolers. The obtained results allow us to assume that PiktoMir provides a working example of a natural textless environment that gradually introduces important programming concepts (such as subroutine, loop) without banging kids over heads.