Introductory Programming Workshop for Children Using Robotics

Introductory Programming Workshop for Children Using Robotics

  Teaching programming concepts to children is a challenging task : to do so effectively requires both curriculum that is organized in a manner that assists children to learn the concepts involved easily, as well as making the content motivating and accessible. While many of the abstract concepts involved in programming are not easily grasped by children, physical metaphors have been used in the past to improve the learning process. Moreover, children are fascinated by the manipulation of physical objects and the creation of physical artifacts. We combine these ideas to use robotics to teach children both the elementary concepts involved in programming (e.g. control flow), as well as some concepts that are often difficult for university students to grasp (e.g. parallel processing). This paper overviews our techniques for accomplishing this through the design of a one-day workshop to introduce children to programming using robotics.