Teaching Computational Reasoning without a Computer
Rafael Dias, Anikó Costa, J.L. Malaquias, Manuel Camara · 2019
With the growing need for STEM workers in the job market, schools tend to look for extra-curricular activities that promote this type of skills. With activities like The Inventors or Happy Code, schools encourage kids to have a mindset more open towards technology. Despite these efforts, the tools available to teach programming to primary school students are still lacking. Available solutions can be too difficult to understand, overly expensive for school budgets or may require IT infrastructure that is lacking from the majority of public schools. As a result, this paper aims to create a concept that can convey the fundamentals of programming/Logical Thinking in an accessible and fun way, without using a computer. For this purpose we use a micro-controller, Micro: Bit, and a physical, puzzle-like representation of a programming framework, called MakeCode.