research-article

Robo-Blocks: designing debugging abilities in a tangible programming system for early primary school children

Authors:

Arnan Sipitakiat,

Nusarin NusenAuthors Info & Claims

IDC '12: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children

Pages 98 - 105

https://doi.org/10.1145/2307096.2307108

Published: 12 June 2012 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

Research on engaging young children in computer programming to develop high-level cognitive skills has suggested that debugging is among the most important actions leading to the development of logical thinking, problem solving, and social interaction skills. Although there have been a significant amount of studies done in this area, the debugging tools and techniques have been developed only as models and instructional methodologies outside of the tool itself. This work presents the design and analysis of debugging abilities embedded into a tangible programming system called Robo-Blocks. Students create a program by connecting physical command blocks, which then wirelessly controls the motion of a floor robot. Debugging is achieved by allowing children to run their program in a step-by-step manner and use passive objects to recognize and identify problems.

Our evaluation with 52 children ages 8-9 has shown that (1) although tangible programming has the benefit of being exceptionally engaging to young children, early primary school children can quickly loose attention when no progress is made on a particular problem unless there are heuristics provided to help them move forward (2) Robo-Block's framework supplements the existing instructional methodologies used in the debugging process. Students showed significant increase in the ability to analyze problems and think of ways to correct them.

References

[1]

Carver, S., and Klahr, D. (1986). Assessing Children's LOGO Debugging Skills with a Formal Model. Journal of Educational Computing Research. 2(4), 487--525.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[2]

Frei, P., Su, V., Mikhak, B., & Ishii, H. (2000). curlybot: designing a new class of computational toys. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 129--136). The Hague, The Netherlands: ACM.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

Horn, M., Solovey, E. T., Jacob, R. J. K. Tangible Programming and Informal Science Learning: Making TUIs Work for Museums, In Proc. IDC 2008 Conference on Interaction Design for Children (2008).

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

McNerney T. (2004). From turtles to Tangible Programming Bricks. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Volume 8, Issue 5 (September 2004), Pages: 326--337

Crossref

Google Scholar

[5]

Morgado, L., Cruz, M., & Kahn, K. (2006). Radia Perlman---A pioneer of young children computer programming. In A. Mendez-Vilas, S. Martin, J. Mesa-Gonzalez, & J. A. Mesa-Gonzalez (Eds.), Current developments in technology-assisted education. Proceedings of m-ICTE 2006 (pp. 1903--1908). Badajoz, Spain: Formatex.

Google Scholar

[6]

Papert, S. (1980/1993). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas (1st and 2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

Pea, R. (1983). Logo Programming and Problem Solving. In Proceedings of the American Educational Research Association Conference, AERA, Montreal, Canada, April 1983.

Google Scholar

[8]

Perlman, R (1976). Using computer technology to provide a creative learning environment for preschool children. Logo memo no 24, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Publications 260, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Google Scholar

[9]

Raffle, H. S., Parkes, A. J., & Ishii, H. (2004). Topobo: a constructive assembly system with kinetic memory. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 647--654). Vienna, Austria: ACM.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[10]

Sipitakiat, A., Blikstein, P. (2007). Designing for Ubiquitous Robot Learning Activities with the GoGo Board, In Proceedings from International Conference on Embedded Systems and Intelligent Technology (pp. 44--47), Bangkok, Thailand.

Google Scholar

[11]

Suzuki H, Kato H (1993) AlgoBlock: a tangible programming language, a tool for collaborative learning. In: Proceedings of the 4th European Logo conference (Eurologo'93), Athens, Greece, August 1993, pp 297--303

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Yang SBaird MO’Rourke EBrennan KSchneider B(2024)Decoding Debugging Instruction: A Systematic Literature Review of Debugging InterventionsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/369065224:4(1-44)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3690652
Zhang FPossaghi ISharma KPapavlasopoulou S(2024)High-performing Groups during Children's Collaborative Coding Activities: What Can Multimodal Data Tell Us?Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3628516.3655805(533-559)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3628516.3655805
Deiner AFraser GRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)NuzzleBug: Debugging Block-Based Programs in ScratchProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623331(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3623331
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Robo-Blocks: designing debugging abilities in a tangible programming system for early primary school children
1. Applied computing
  1. Education
2. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

Recommendations

Tangible programming elements for young children
CHI EA '02: CHI '02 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Tangible programming elements offer the dynamic and programmable properties of a computer without the complexity introduced by the keyboard, mouse and screen. This paper explores the extent to which programming skills are used by children during ...
The use of mobile phones to support children's literacy learning
PERSUASIVE'07: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Persuasive technology

The goal of this study was to develop a mobile-phone based intervention that would encourage parents to engage their children in daily literacy-learning activities. The intervention content included text messages for parents, audio messages for parents ...
Jabberstamp: embedding sound and voice in traditional drawings
IDC '07: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Interaction design and children

We introduce Jabberstamp, the first tool that allows children to synthesize their drawings and voices. To use Jabberstamp, children create drawings, collages or paintings on normal paper. They press a special rubber stamp onto the page to record sounds ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

IDC '12: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children

June 2012

399 pages

ISBN:9781450310079

DOI:10.1145/2307096

Conference Chair:
Heidi Schelhowe
University of Bremen, Germany

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 June 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

IDC '12

Sponsor:

didactalab
IMIS

IDC '12: The 11th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children

June 12 - 15, 2012

Bremen, Germany

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 172 of 578 submissions, 30%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

45
Total Citations
View Citations
808
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)52
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7

Reflects downloads up to 23 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Yang SBaird MO’Rourke EBrennan KSchneider B(2024)Decoding Debugging Instruction: A Systematic Literature Review of Debugging InterventionsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/369065224:4(1-44)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3690652
Zhang FPossaghi ISharma KPapavlasopoulou S(2024)High-performing Groups during Children's Collaborative Coding Activities: What Can Multimodal Data Tell Us?Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3628516.3655805(533-559)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3628516.3655805
Deiner AFraser GRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)NuzzleBug: Debugging Block-Based Programs in ScratchProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623331(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3623331
Severance SMiller EKrajcik J(2024)IF science AND making AND computing: Insights for project-based learning and primary science curriculum designStudies in Science Education10.1080/03057267.2024.2397300(1-65)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/03057267.2024.2397300
Naude EFowler ALemon RSutherland C(2023)Kupe's Journey: Building a Low-cost, Screen-free Robotic Programming Environment for Children2023 20th International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR)10.1109/UR57808.2023.10202226(710-715)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/UR57808.2023.10202226
Loureiro MGuerra CCabrita IMoreira F(2022)Multiple Case Studies About Robotics in Compulsory EducationHandbook of Research on Global Education and the Impact of Institutional Policies on Educational Technologies10.4018/978-1-7998-8193-3.ch006(100-129)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-8193-3.ch006
Loureiro MMoreira FSenos S(2022)Introduction to Computational Thinking With MI-GOResearch Anthology on Computational Thinking, Programming, and Robotics in the Classroom10.4018/978-1-6684-2411-7.ch041(948-969)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-2411-7.ch041
Bofferding LKocabas SAqazade MHaiduc AChen L(2022)The effect of play and worked examples on first and third graders' creating and debugging of programming algorithmsComputational Thinking in PreK-510.1145/3507951.3519284(19-29)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3507951.3519284
Bakala EGerosa AHourcade JPascale MHergatacorzian CTejera G(2022)Design Factors Affecting the Social Use of Programmable Robots to Learn Computational Thinking in KindergartenProceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3501712.3529745(422-429)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3501712.3529745
Yu JSakhardande PParmar ROh H(2022)Strawctures: A Modular Electronic Construction Kit for Human-Scale Interactive StructuresProceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3490149.3501322(1-10)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3490149.3501322
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Tangible programming elements for young children

The use of mobile phones to support children's literacy learning

Jabberstamp: embedding sound and voice in traditional drawings