Robot teaching assistant and physical programming class for programming education of young children

Abstract

This paper proposes a programming class for young children. In order to reduce the burden on teachers and attract students' interest, a robot teaching assistant is used to explain programming knowledge, verify and run programs. Different from writing programs on a computer, the physical board programming is employed to develop logical thinking of young children and prevent them from the vision harm of facing computer screens for a long time and the lack of reality from immersion in the virtual world. Based on the knowledge points of programming, we have designed a course with 16 lessons. The course has been successfully applied in many kindergartens and elementary schools. We use the questionnaires for students and teachers to evaluate the course and the experimental results show that it is effective.