The effectiveness of an unplugged coding education system that enables coding education without computers

Abstract

An unplugged block coding system that can be used to code without a computer was developed in 2014 with the support of the Korea Research Foundation. This unplugged block coding system is a type of tangible programming that can be used to code by combining unplugged blocks that contain a small board or sensor mounted in the block of a flowchart’s command symbol. In this study, we set the dependent variables as computational thinking skill and interest in software education, and we attempted to verify the effectiveness of the unplugged block coding system. The study method was a nonequivalent pre-test-post-test experimental design. During the course of the study, the experimental group and the comparison group performed programming activities to control the movement of a car the groups had in common. In the experimental group, we conducted the tangible programming activity, which controls the movement of the car by using the unplugged block coding system. The comparison group used Educational Programming Language programming activities to control the motion of the car using Scratch 2.0. As a result, it was confirmed that the experimental group showed a significant improvement in computational thinking skill and interest in Software education compared to the comparison group.