The PedaGoGo. Teaching children computer programming

Abstract: The aim of this report is to describe the development a programmable physical toy, designed to teach children, aged ten to twelve, computer programming concepts. As technology and computers play an increasingly large role in our society, the desire to teach young minds programming is growing. How then, do you teach children in a fun, and still pedagogical, way?

The work was divided into different phases, the first of which was a prestudy conducted to research the various ways in which children learn and how to keep them motivated when learning, particularly when learning to program. This prestudy mainly focuses on previous research and studies within this subject. The next phase was the implementation of the product; a modified version of the graphical programming language Scratch, incorporated into a webpage, and a modified version of the mobile robot GoPiGo. Based on results from two separate case studies involving users of the appropriate age, during the evaluation phase, a help panel was implemented in order to make the platform simple to use and to incorporate the pedagogical aspects of the project.

The report describes the phases of this work and the technical details of both the modifications made on the Scratch platform and the GoPiGo robot toy, which have both received a positive response from the target audience. The finished product is a robot on wheels that can successfully be programmed through the platform with a help panel, describing various programming concepts and with optional tasks, designed to motivate the users to learn. The results of the project also include observations and the results of two surveys from the conducted user evaluations.