Impacts of creating smart everyday objects on young female students' programming skills and attitudes

Abstract

In computer programming education, learning to program tangible objects has become a common way to introduce programming to young students. In an effort to address this intervention, scientific research has been done on the effectiveness of using tangible hardware platforms such as robots and wearable products to teach basic programming concepts to children. However, there is a lack of research on how young students' attitudes and programming skills are influenced over time, when they learn to program tangible objects and make them smart. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of using a tangible everyday object and making it smart on young female students' attitudes towards programming and the acquisition of basic programming skills. During a 4-day non-formal programming workshop with 12 6th grade students, they were introduced to basic programming concepts, and learned how to apply them to turn a houseplant into a smart object. In a pilot study, we employed a block-based programming environment and analyzed the students' trajectories of attitudes towards programming and performance based on repeated open-ended qualitative questionnaires and programming questions throughout the workshop. The results show that all students had high confidence regarding programming skills, regardless of creating smart objects. Furthermore, it indicates that experienced students highly valued the programming of tangible everyday objects compared with inexperienced students. The findings of this work contribute to our understanding of how making tangible everyday objects smart can support the development of a positive attitude and keep up of interest throughout a programming workshop among girls.