Modular Tasks Design for Teaching Young Students on Physical Computing Platforms
Karen H. Jin · 2019
Physical computing has gained popularity as a hands-on approach to introduce computing. Young students can create tangible computing artifacts that connect across the curriculum subjects on a wide range of kid-friendly devices. However, physical computing can place a higher demand on cognitive capacity than traditional screen-based environments since learning involves the more complex tasks of programming and constructing hardware components and circuits. In this paper, we present an instructional design approach to address the challenges of teaching physical computing for middle school students. A hands-on project is modularized into tasks that isolate the software or hardware workloads. The tasks are then optimized into a sequence to minimize context switches between programming and hardware construction. Students' individual progress over a task sequence is monitored by group and peer checkpoints. We conducted a preliminary study among three random groups of grade 5-7 students working on activities of different levels of hardware complexity. The results indicate that our modular approach help students maintain a positive attitude and persist over difficulties while learning complex physical computing tasks.