Abstract
Teaching programming in early childhood (4-9) to enhance computational thinking has gained popularity in the recent movement of computer science for all. However, current practices ignore some fundamental issues resulting from young children's developmental readiness, such as the sustained capability to keyboarding, the decomposition of complex tasks to small tasks, the need for intuitive mapping from abstract programming to tangible outcomes, and the limited amount of screen time exposure. To address these issues in this paper, we present a novel methodology with an AI-powered integration platform to effectively teach computational thinking for young children. The system features a hybrid pedagogy that supports both the top-down and bottom-up approach for teaching computational thinking. Young children can describe their desired task in natural language, while the system can respond with an easy-to-understand program consisting of the right level of decomposed sub-tasks. A tangible robot can immediately execute the decomposed program and demonstrate the program's outcomes to young children. The system is equipped with an intelligent chatbot that can interact with young children through natural languages, and children can speak to the chatbot to complete all the needed programming tasks, while the chatbot orchestrates the execution of the program onto the robot. This would completely eliminates the need of keyboards for young children to program. By developing such a system, we aim to make the concept of computational thinking more accessible to young children, fostering a natural understanding of programming concepts without the need of explicit programming skills. Through the interactive experience provided by the robotic agent, our system seeks to engage children in an effective manner, contributing to the field of educational technology for early childhood computer science education.
Abstract (translated)
在最近的教育技术运动中,教授4-9岁儿童编程以增强计算思维已经变得越来越受欢迎。然而,现有的做法忽视了儿童发展准备阶段的一些基本问题,例如持续的键盘能力、将复杂任务分解为小任务、从抽象编程到直观成果的直觉映射以及屏幕时间受限等问题。为了解决这些问题,本文提出了一种新的方法,该方法配备了一个AI驱动的集成平台,以有效教授计算思维给儿童。 该系统采用混合教育方法,支持从上到下的教学方法和从下到上的教学方法,以教授计算思维。儿童可以使用自然语言描述他们的所需任务,而系统会以易于理解的程序回答,该程序包括适当的分解子任务。一个实体机器人可以立即执行分解程序并展示其成果给儿童。系统配备了一个智能聊天机器人,可以通过自然语言与儿童交互,儿童可以与聊天机器人完成所有编程任务,而聊天机器人将程序执行给机器人。这将完全消除年轻孩子编程时使用键盘的需求。 通过开发这样一个系统,我们的目标是让计算思维的概念更容易为儿童所理解,促进对编程概念的自然理解,而无需具备显式的编程技能。通过机器人代理提供的交互式体验,我们的系统试图以有效的方式激发儿童参与,为早期 childhood计算机科学教育领域做出贡献。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00750
