Improvement of a tangible programming tool for the study of the subroutine concept

Abstract

We developed a tangible programming education tool “P-CUBE2” to aim at learning benefits of subroutine such as to create a function once and then reuse it. The target user of this tool are visual impairments and inexperienced persons who are not familiar with PC operation. We introduced the function mat, utterance function blocks and HIRAGANA (Japanese character) blocks so that user can learn subroutine concept. Users can create the function of utterance by combining and placing these blocks which on the function mat. The created function of utterance can be called on the main mat. By these operation, the user can control a robot which outputs sound as a controlled object. In this research, we introduce the system configuration of the P-CUBE2 and report the result of experiment for evaluation of the tool operability.