Code Roads: Teaching Kids Coding Fundamentals With Tangible Interaction

Abstract: What if a computer wasn’t necessarily the best place for kids to learn the fundamentals of coding? A new wave of digital coding teaching tools has been ushered into America, with the country progressively gaining more interest in having kids learn code.  The goal of this project has been to propose an alternative teaching method, one focused and tailored to students who learn best through kinesthetic and visual means.  The approach has been to combine tangible interaction principles to help make the introductory stages of learning code as approachable and intuitive as possible.  The final result of this thesis is a modular toy system which gradually introduces kids to the fundamentals of coding independent of a computer, prompting exploration and problem solving.