Empirical Findings In A Small Steps Oriented Collaborative Programming Workshop Introducing Project Rotation In Groups

The further development in information and communication technologies (ICT) is making advances in the information society. In such society, children are expected to be creative thinkers. In order to respond to the need, many workshops are held where the participants perform programming on computers to foster general-purpose skills required by the society. The author's group has been conducting such workshops for over ten years in cooperation with NPOs. In the workshops, children come up with various ideas while doing programming and express initiatively and freely, unlike oneway lecture style classes. The purpose of the workshop is to provide children with opportunities to experience learning that fosters their creativity."Small step," breaking the project task into small steps, is an important concept when making a program on a computer. It is necessary to clarify what functions should be created for the final goal. "Small step" is an ability that can be used not only in programming but also in various situations in the contemporary society. In addition, the ability can be fostered through learning such as programming. However, from our ten-year experience, we found that there are not many children who can program while applying "small step" concept. Therefore, we need to devise an idea for children to be able to program while performing segmentation.M. Resnick has proposed a "creative thinking spiral" as a process model for nurturing creative thinking [1]. This is a spiral that repeatedly carries out the process of "imagine", "create", "play', "share" and "reflect", and fosters creative thinking. It is possible to promote spirals more by performing collaborative learning that involves teaching and learning among children, instead of the conventional teaching style of simultaneous teaching like school education. Therefore, children must have an opportunity to communicate with other children and share ideas.In this research, to meet the above-mentioned challenges, we let children to program while rotating a project within a group. Rotating a project make children think about the continuation of the works created by other children and have a strong awareness of the steps. On top of that, rotating a project automatically activates sharing and collaborative learning. In this paper, we describe the design of a small steps oriented collaborative programming workshop and empirical findings.