Arnan Sipitakiat

Robo-Blocks: designing debugging abilities in a tangible programming system for early primary school children

Research on engaging young children in computer programming to develop high-level cognitive skills has suggested that debugging is among the most important actions leading to the development of logical thinking, problem solving, and social interaction skills. Although there have been a significant amount of studies done in this area, the debugging tools and techniques have been developed only as models and instructional methodologies outside of the tool itself. This work presents the design and analysis of debugging abilities embedded into a tangible programming system called Robo-Blocks. Students create a program by connecting physical command blocks, which then wirelessly controls the motion of a floor robot. Debugging is achieved by allowing children to run their program in a step-by-step manner and use passive objects to recognize and identify problems. Our evaluation with 52 children ages 8-9 has shown that (1) although tangible programming has the benefit of being exceptionally engaging to young children, early primary school children can quickly loose attention when no progress is made on a particular problem unless there are heuristics provided to help them move forward (2) Robo-Blocks framework supplements the existing instructional methodologies used in the debugging process. Students showed significant increase in the ability to analyze problems and think of ways to correct them.

The City That We Want: generative themes, constructionist technologies and school/social change

We describe a project, The City that We Want, which enabled the constructionist use of technology within a generative theme to enable students to design and construct their ideas about how to improve life in their communities. We used a variety of computational technologies combined with crafts and scrap materials. The goal was for children to learn in a more contextualized manner important ideas in the disciplines through their projects. We designed the overall project itself as an object to think with in order to facilitate a broader reform in the schools. The willing participation, inspired projects, and commitment and development of the teachers demonstrated significant value.

Sketching intentions: comparing different metaphors for programming robots

This paper introduces a new environment for programming robots and physical computing devices---the Spatial Computing Platform (SCP)---and compares it to a text-based programming environment (the Cricket Logo). The SCP simplifies the process of constructing conditional statements that link the robots inputs and outputs together. It does this by providing the user with a virtual canvas that they can draw rectangles on using the mouse. Each rectangle represents a range of sensor values, and specific outputs can be assigned to each rectangle. When the sensor values enter into the specified range, the outputs will turn on. We designed a study with 60 youth to compare this environment to Cricket Logo, a well-known variant of Logo designed to control robotic devices. We found that participants using the spatial computing platform were able to build programs of higher complexity and make more changes to their programs over the course of an hour-long workshop.