With the development of IT Technology, the software industry has become one of the core parts in representing national competitiveness. Accordingly, the importance of programming education has been increasingly emphasized. Also, people have considered...
With the development of IT Technology, the software industry has become one of the core parts in representing national competitiveness. Accordingly, the importance of programming education has been increasingly emphasized. Also, people have considered logical thinking ability and creativity to be critical cognitive constructs for the 21st century skills for learners. However, programming education has some issues: it is difficult to acquire programming language skills; learning environments in programming education is not context-based. These limitations have impeded the development of programming education.
In this study, Scratch which is one of the easiest tools among educational programming language (EPL) was adopted. In addition, an educational robot was used as the physical tool for showing the results from the programming. The research variables included logical thinking ability and creativity.
As part of sequential steps for systematic research, literature review was conducted to analyze the advantages and limitations of the programming education, EPL, and educational robots. Next, the convergence curriculum for the research were developed including mathematics, music and Korean language.
After a pilot study in an elementary school with 26 third graders for 12 weeks, experts participated to improve the curriculum. In the main study, a total of 87 elementary school students participated in the research for 12 weeks.
To measure the effectiveness of the curriculum model in a quantitative way, a paired t-test were conducted using a revised version of the Group Assessment of Logical Thinking(GALT) for logical thinking ability, the Korean Figural Creativity Test for Elementary School Students (K-FCTES) for creativity. Also, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants for a qualitative approach. The results showed that there found to be differences in both logical thinking ability and creativity. Especially in creativity, fluency and uniqueness had significant differences.
This study provided empirical evidence that programming education with educational robots were effective in fostering learner’s capabilities. The suggestions for further study included: First, there is a need for a more detailed research design to examine the effectiveness of robot learning and programming education. Second, systematic professional development programs should be offered for the wide distribution of programming education with robots in the future. Third, various research on this issue such as different programings, robots, instructional strategies, etc. needs to be conducted for rich empirical data.