Autonomous Learning Intelligent Vehicles Engineering in a Programming Learning Application for Youth: ALIVE PLAY
Jihene Rezgui, Félix Jobin, Simon Beaulieu, Zarine Ardekani-Djoneidi · 2021
The world of programming is taking a more and more important place in our lives, yet this field is a mystery for many people. Due to its appearing complexity, the majority of young students have many difficulties in learning programming and the tools for this purpose can be less attractive as they should. This paper seeks to raise this issue in learning programming applications and the lack of a transition between an easy block-based interface to a common programming language. It also proposes Autonomous Learning Intelligent Vehicles Engineering in a Programming Learning Application for Youth, called ALIVE PLAY to arouse the interest of young students by letting them interact with a physical vehicle. Additionally, it contains two distinct interfaces to suit the needs of all ages, including a new builtin programming language, named AliveScript that helps the student to make his way from block-based programming to true programming. Preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of ALIVE PLAY in terms of young students’ interest, curiosity and satisfaction. In fact, they would want to explore more aspects related to the vehicle, and this is why we hope that this project reaches many schools in the near future.