# Levels of Control in Primary Robotics

Ivan Kalaš, Andrea Hrusecka

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Ivan Kalaš, Andrea Hrusecka. Levels of Control in Primary Robotics. IFIP World Conference on Computers in Education (WCCE), Aug 2022, Hiroshima, Japan. pp.244-257, 10.1007/978-3-031-43393-1_23. hal-05533310

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# Levels of Control in Primary Robotics

Ivan Kalas✉ and Andrea Hrusecka ID

Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
{ivan.kalas,andrea.hrusecka}@fmph.uniba.sk

**Abstract.** For several years, we have been developing educational content for informatics for lower primary education (years ranging from one to four and age ranging from six to ten). The resulting intervention is built of three complementary strands, with robotics as the most recently completed one. Here, pupils work with Blue-Bot programmable robots, equipped with blue wireless external control panels. Each team pairs the robot with the panel and controls it using small plastic command tiles. We also use the introduction of new content as a set of research instruments and aim to deepen our understanding of how pupils construct and extend their comprehension of basic computing concepts and related operations. We focus on determining which of these concepts are considered as more challenging to pupils. The current project is established on our previous research on different levels of control in programming and related program representations. Here, we focused on exploring whether, even when programming a physical robot using an external control panel, the transition from direct control to programming is a challenging cognitive transformation for young learners.

**Keywords:** Educational Robotics · Informatics · Lower Primary · Levels of Control · Representation of Program

## 1 Introduction

The implementation of informatics<fnref n="1" /> in primary school has become a real trend. Issues, such as curriculum design, teacher professional development (PD), the development of computational thinking (CT), and related educational research activities, are the focus of researchers, educators and stakeholders. In Slovakia, informatics as a subject has been extended from secondary education as being compulsory in years 3 and 4 already (eight to ten years old pupils), see for example the recent EC JRC study [1]. However, the real challenge for educators and content designers is to fulfil the intention of the subject and to promote it in the sense of computing for all [2], sustainably and systematically, with suitably designed progression, respecting developmental appropriateness and knowledge of the pupils and continuously supporting primary teachers.

Our study involves informatics education in all mentioned aspects. Whenever we complete an iterative, evidence-based development (always focused on elementary programming at kindergarten, primary or secondary stages), we start using new intervention

<footnote n="1">¹ In various countries alternatively named informatics, computer science, computing or the like.</footnote>
as an instrument for further research. This is based on our conviction that establishing informatics education and continuously supporting its development is not possible without in-depth knowledge of how pupils build their understanding of basic concepts and related operations, exploring which concepts and operations are more demanding for them than others. This is what we had in mind in the Robotics for Primary project which is a part of our long-term design research<fnref n="2" /> project Informatics with Emil. Thanks to a robotics intervention, which we recently completed and started to disseminate in Slovak and Czech schools, we obtained an important complementary research instrument. In this paper, we present how we used it to additionally validate our observation from the development period: With appropriately chosen robotic equipment and suitable pedagogy, the cognitive demand of transitioning between control levels is surprisingly different from programming a virtual character on the screen.

The detailed findings presented here were reported in the symposium *Informatics in Primary<fnref n="3" /> Education: Approaches, Current Issues and Lessons Learnt*, organised by the working group WG3.1 of The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) in August 2022 in Hiroshima, as a part of WCCE 2022.

## 2 Programming at Primary Stage

If we intend to build sustainable programming, starting as early as in primary, we should be clear about how we perceive programming, its difficulty and its role in pupils' education and lives. Especially, when we also strive to thoroughly consider the developmental specificities of these age groups. Here, we draw on Blackwell who believes that pupils start programming when they are not directly manipulating observable things, but specify "behaviour to occur at some future time" [5, p.5]. Blackwell [ibid] continues by pointing out that programming is hard because of (a) the loss of the benefits of direct manipulation and (b) introduction of notational elements to represent abstraction. Having this in mind, designers should always pay close attention to pupils' cognitive transitions between different concepts and related operations, levels of control and various forms of the control representations [6–8].

### 2.1 Educational Robotics

Educational robotics is an important context in which control and representation can be explored. Fortunately, content designers, educators and researchers agree that educational robotics provides great opportunities to develop computational thinking at every level of education, including primary (or even earlier, in kindergarten).

<footnote n="2">² Modern research design, see [3], suitable for interwoven development and research.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ For the purposes of the symposium and this paper, primary education is understood in the sense of the UNESCO ISCED [4] classification as a level of formal school education: (1) with the entrance age usually between 5 to 7, typically lasting until age 10 to 12, (2) focus on providing pupils with fundamental skills and establishing their solid foundation for learning, (3) often with one generalist teacher responsible for a group of pupils, facilitating most of the learning process (sometimes with other teachers for certain subjects).</footnote>
According to Batko [9], educational robotics is an umbrella term for the rich field linked to pedagogy and using robots as a means to achieve educational goals. In our narrower perspective, it is also considered an important part of informatics education. Its history dates back to early 1970s when Papert and his team created a turtle [10], the world's first educational robot. After several pioneering projects in the 1980s, a new phase of educational robotics was launched in late 1990s with the ground-breaking Lego Mindstorms kit. However, it wasn't until the 2010s that a plethora of different educational robots emerged, and that's also when interest in educational robotics in schools boomed significantly.

Educators and researchers focus on the integration of robots into education for various purposes and in different forms. More importantly, from its very beginning, robots and various devices have also served as a means for exploring the learning process of children and pupils in elementary programming. In 1974, Perlman, then supervised by Papert, tried to explore the concept of procedure in a tangible programming interface for preschool children in her Tortis Slot Machine [11, 12]. Thus, she started studying the cognitive difficulties of some aspects of programming with pre-schoolers.

More recently, Sullivan and Heffernan [13] provide a systematic review of the research literature related to the use of robotics construction kits in K-12 learning in the STEM disciplines and refer to them as computational manipulatives for learning. El-Hamamsy et al. [14] present the informatics and robotics integration model for primary school, which identifies elementary informatics concepts suitable for primary school teachers to develop their understanding as part of the professional development (PD) programme without computers, through Robotics Unplugged activities that employ physical robots. Mikova and Krcho [15] analyse several cognitive taxonomies applied in the context of educational robotics and present their own taxonomy as a result of their research. Developmentally appropriate robotics kits and computational concepts that can be supported at primary level are also studied by Chalmers [16], focusing on sequencing and emerging awareness of loops and patterns.

Finally, we want to draw attention to an interesting systematic review of research trends in robotics education for young children and pupils. Jung and Won [17] report that most of the existing studies used constructivist and constructionist frameworks but suggest research agendas should be diversified and the diversity of research participants should be broadened. They also encourage researchers to study which skills are developed by young learners in the robotics context in connection to informatics education.

## 2.2 Exploring Control and Representation in Primary Programming

The above mentioned suggestion to focus on how young learners develop computational thinking and skills in the context of robotics is in line with our research's goals. In each of our recent design research projects, from ScratchMaths [7, 18] to date [8, 19], we have focused on gaining better understanding of the learners' cognitive processes in informatics, specifically in programming. In each of these research projects, we have exploited our framework [6]. In developing it, we have been thinking about how to explore and characterise the increasing difficulty of tasks in various educational contents for programming. For that purpose, we created a two-dimensional structure in which the
first dimension represents four levels of control of a sprite (a character, a turtle, a robot, an object etc.) from:

* the simplest level of direct manipulation, when learners control (a) a physical robot by hand, for example on a floor mat, or (b) a virtual character by dragging it in the stage or 'manually' switching its costume in the *Costumes* tab of *Scratch* etc.

* to the most complex computational control when learners build a program, one or several scripts, for a robot or a sprite as a representation of a future behaviour.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 1.** Two dimensions of the framework for studying increasing cognitive demands of the programming tasks based on [6].</figcaption></figure>

The second dimension allows studying the cognitive demand of the concepts and related operations from the perspective of the way in which the behaviour (the process) is represented. We identified three major types: having no representation at all, keeping a record of the steps, and building a program in advance, using certain notation. However, we found out that the second and third types should be divided into subtypes, thus revealing five types of representations altogether, see Fig. 1. Surprisingly, all of the grid points of the framework have meaningful interpretations in primary programming, including 'extremes' like **B** and **C**. In [6], we concluded that any programming content by its progression of activities usually tends to advance from a certain starting point of the grid towards point **D** (in a Manhattan-style moves, i.e., from left to right and/or from top to bottom). In the first world (part) of Emil for Year 3, for example, the resulting progression is **125** (i.e., progressing from **1** to **2** to **5**), and in its second world, it is **3D**.

We will deal with further validation of the framework in other research, with the aim of applying it to assess the cognitive demands of the tasks in Emil for Year 4. We expect this may result in the framework's modifications and extension. However, in our current project, we use the above mentioned framework specifically to analyse the cognitive demands of learners' activities in educational robotics, as recommended by Jung and Won [17]. Specifically, we investigate whether the use of a blue control panel (see next section) affects the difficulty of transitioning from direct control with one externally represented command to computational control with an external plan, i.e., a sequence of commands.
## 2.3 Informatics with Emil

In this long-term data-based design research, we heavily draw on the intensive and formative study of Papert. Here, we mention the two following points in this context, as far as they frame our robotics development as well:

* Educational programming in its broad interpretation provides excellent opportunities to explore powerful ideas. Papert referred to his dream Mathland [10]. We can help pupils explore powerful computational ideas in informatics.

* We strive to help pupils to gradually transfer their focus from solving a problem to thinking about an explicit representation of the solution, often a program. In modern informatics education, it is our program that represents our idea, and the program becomes an object to think with and think about.

## 2.4 Robotics for Primary Project

We assume that robotics must form part of any informatics teaching content. Although this opinion is widely accepted by designers and educators, the available content only partially exploits opportunities to fully encounter powerful ideas of informatics. In our design, we focus on this prospect while maintaining possibilities to integrate technologies into other subjects also. We chose to devote five lessons to robotics in each year of primary, using TTS Blue-Bots equipped with the TacTile readers and control panels wirelessly connected to the robots, see Fig. 2. We decided to use the panels from the first lesson with the youngest pupils.

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2. (a) Pupils first pair the panel with the robot using the blue button on the right, then use the panel with a card as a remote control – they send the command to execute by using the green button. (b) However, they can also plan an entire program on the panel in advance. (c) The control buttons on the robot are locked after pairing with the panel.</figcaption></figure>

In our robotics, we stick to the same pedagogical and design principles:

* We strive to respect and exploit all benefits of the ‘primary style teaching’.

* Teachers do not explain but support their pupils to explore and discover.
* Pupils never work alone. In Emil, they work in pairs with one tablet, and in robotics, they work in teams of three or four pupils. They collaborate all the time, arguing within and between teams, communicate and discuss to learn together.

* Through the whole content, we work with multiple representations of the programs, positions, headings, paths and everything.

* We encourage pupils to 'think with their programs', to build, share, explain and modify them, come across various constraints and accept them and learn from each 'mistake'.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 3.** An example from the First steps: *How will the robot go? Program it and find out. Draw the path and its goal. Use the blue panel and return with the robot along the same path.*</figcaption></figure>

In this research, within the robotics thread of the Emil project, we exploited our two-dimensional control/representation structure presented earlier. Namely, we explored the cognitive demands of the different levels of control applied in the primary robotics in the context of pupils using the external panel to control the robot.

In the numerous iterations of the design research [3] development, we closely collaborated with our university's partner design primary schools. Eventually, we settled on the structure of the content with four parts (or 'steps') of the activities. In the **First steps**, the external panel is used to control Ema (the robot) and the main goal is the progression from using one command to planning a program. Figure 3 illustrates an activity from this part. In the **Second steps**, pupils control Ema by using its own buttons, see Fig. 2(c) – with the program hidden inside the robot. In our framework, this is called an internal plan representation, see Fig. 3. In the **Third steps**, pupils use Ema's buttons also but represent their program in parallel, using paper cut-out cards with pictures of corresponding command. In the **Fourth steps**, a free choice to select working with any of these control/representation strategies stays with each team. Figure 4 illustrates an activity from the fourth part.

In this research, we focused on further verification of learners' acceptance of a blue panel to control Ema from the beginning. We formulated our objectives into the following research questions:

(RQ1) *How do pupils accept the use of the blue panels?*

(RQ2) *How do pupils progress from direct control to multiple commands planning?*
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 4.** An example from the Fourth steps: *Both robots will dance the same dance. Let the blue robot follow the path coded D2 E2 E3 D3 D2 D1 C1. Program the blue robot. What code will the red robot pass? Draw both paths and compare.*</figcaption></figure>

## 3 Method

In early 2022, we contacted 176 teachers from primary schools in the Czech Republic and Slovakia who had already attended one-day PD sessions dedicated to our educational content Robotics for primary. The critical component of this PD session is devoted to the pedagogy that we exploit with our Blue-Bot Ema (and Emil<fnref n="4" />).

In the first stage of the research, we asked the teachers about their consent to participate in our research as well as some basic open-ended questions in the form of an electronic questionnaire about when they had participated in the training, whether they were already working with the new educational content with their pupils, in which years and how they had already progressed with the activities. Thus, we obtained valuable information about the levels of control and forms of representation that they were already applying with their pupils in robotics. Based on the replies, we identified a narrower sample for the second stage of the research, i.e., teachers who have already experienced their pupils working with blue control panels.

We obtained 36 consents and responses to our initial questions, whose descriptive overview is provided in Fig. 5. All respondents participated in a PD in robotics sometime between August 2021 and May 2022. Of the 20 teachers who have not yet begun working with Ema with their pupils (as of the date of that stage of the research, the 2021/22 school year), ten plan to begin in September 2022, some in the 2023 or 2024⁵ school year or have not yet decided.

Our research focused on how learners adopted control panels and their role while transitioning from direct control to computational control, i.e., programming. As seen in Fig. 5 (b), all 16 teachers already working with our content have begun in each year of the primary stage. According to (c), in each year, they have started the First Steps part of the content. Hence, all pupils of the 16 teachers, in each year, have already started

<footnote n="4">⁴ We have already briefly presented these pedagogical principles earlier in the paper.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Czech primary schools are currently in the process of implementing informatics as a mandatory subject at primary level, and schools are encouraged to start teaching it not later than in September 2023 or September 2024.</footnote>
controlling robot with a single command and have experienced the transition to planning
several steps in advance with the program explicitly represented on the panel.

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 5.** Breakdown of n = 36 sample according to the number of teachers (a) already working with our content with their pupils, (b) working with pupils, by years, (c) who already started with First steps, Second steps etc., by Years of school.</figcaption></figure>

In the second stage of the research, we addressed only those 16 teachers, thus forming our narrow purposeful sample with a set of questions focused on our current research questions. We also asked them to scan some of the already solved pages from the pupils' workbooks. The analysis of these, however, goes beyond the scope of this paper, and we will report the corresponding results separately.

At this stage of our research, we received responses from seven teachers who repre-
sent the situation in six Czech and Slovak primary schools and have experience of using
our content in 21 classrooms with a total of 386 pupils. Part (a) of Fig. 6 shows that these
were classes in all years of primary school: Three teachers started with Ema in Year 1,
three in Year 2, and so on. Similar to n = 36, those n = 7 teachers (a subset of n = 36)
most frequently started working with First steps in Year 3.

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 6.** Breakdown of n = 7 sample according to (a) teachers already doing our content with pupils, by Years, (b) teachers who already started with First steps, Second steps etc., by years.</figcaption></figure>

To process and analyse the data obtained from the online questionnaire, we used a qualitative data analysis app QualCoder 3.1 [20] and applied standard method of coding and collapsing the codes into themes [21]. In the initial coding process, we applied over 30 codes, like order of the commands, debugging, collaboration, interrupting running
program, pairing Ema and control panel and so on, which we subsequently collapsed into seven themes, presented and commented in the following section.

## 4 Results

By analysing the collected responses, we pursued our main objective. Specifically, we wanted to better understand how controlling a robot using a programmable panel similar to a remote control affects learners as they move from direct control (giving a single command to the robot) to planning and executing a program. An important feature of the panels used by the pupils is that a command or several commands are explicitly represented and visible. In presenting and interpreting the findings, we follow the five resulting themes that emerged from the data analysis. In our narrative, we first focus on the technical and organisational aspects, then on some affective aspects and the classroom atmosphere, and finally on the cognitive findings dealing with the different levels of mastery in compulsory informatics education in primary school.

## 5 Discussion

Among the results obtained, we would like to emphasize the following:

* Teachers in our sample know the importance of collaboration and the need to gradually develop it with our pupils. The educational content presented here and its pedagogy create numerous situations where teams in the classroom seek for and develop different collaborative practices (Figs. 3 and 4). When asked how they proceeded and collaborated in solving a particular problem, pupils also explain to each other, for example, the different strategies for dividing the tasks in the team. For example, it is faster and safer if the program is not being constructed on the panel by only one team member, but someone dictates or reads it and another looks up the tiles and hands them to the mate who puts the cards on the panel. Different strategies and forms of cooperation lead to different success in problem-solving and are worth discussing and sharing.

* Teachers also mention various minor problems (Table 1). Other technical problems – although rare – can also be used to benefit the development of computational thinking. For example, the simultaneous pairing of robots with panels and the connections cross by the teams is a computational phenomenon worthy of discussion.

* Teachers also consider it an advantage that pupils have an explicit representation of the program being built and executed in front of them on the panel. They can repeatedly execute the same program – unchanged – for Ema on different starting positions and with different initial headings. They can work with the program as an object of thought and can easily notice their program's properties. They can also easily spot a bug in the program and fix it by replacing one tile with another, which we consider a true affordance of the blue TacTile panels.

* Finally, the most significant result of this research is the following: Teachers in our sample confirmed that in most of the 21 participating classes, the use of the panels from the beginning of pupils' work with Ema – in every primary year – reduces
<table><caption>**Table 1.** Presentation and interpretation of the identified themes (In the left column are our findings from the analysis of the collected data; teachers' quotes are in italics; the right column contains our interpretations and comments).</caption><tr><td><strong>Organisation and course of the lesson.</strong><br>Pupils work on the floor, divided in teams of three or four. Each team has their own mat and robot Ema<br>Pupils either stand and walk around the mat with the blue panel in their hands while solving the problems or sit around the mat and rotate it on the floor or they just imagine Ema's current direction while programming and can plan a path containing <strong>left</strong> and <strong>right</strong> commands in this way also. Teachers believe that this is mainly how older and more mature pupils work</td><td>Papert [10] refers to this behaviour as <em>body syntonic learning</em>. Thanks to this identification with a robot that they control, learners can plan, execute and debug the program as early as in year one or even earlier</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Technical issues.</strong> Pupils are sometimes confused about whether to start the program with the <strong>Send</strong> button on the panel or with the <strong>GO</strong> button on Ema<br>Pupils do not know how to interrupt the program currently running from the panel<br>Sometimes, the tiles did not work. Other times, the Bluetooth pairing between Ema and the panel did not work. Pupils had to learn how to turn the two devices off and on again and pair them afresh<br><em>... sometimes the panel remembered commands from the previous program...</em></td><td>We believe this may happen if they had worked with Bee-Bots or Blue-Bots before, using a different pedagogy and not starting with the blue control panel immediately<br>We have the same experience and do not know how to interrupt the running program either<br>We have never experienced this; it is hard to know what exactly happened</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Collaboration.</strong> It often depends on how well those in the team work together. First, they solve problems by taking turns. Gradually, however, they learn to work more efficiently and collectively. Teams happily solve tasks together and like to discuss<br><em>If there are good partners in the team, they thrive, and I am there to ask follow-up questions and inspire them to think further. If that's not the case, often I'm solving problems like 'I was next, but Don beat me to it...'</em></td><td>The development of collaboration and communication is one of the key goals of our educational content in informatics and its pedagogy. We will get back to this in the concluding section</td></tr></table>

(continued)
<table><caption>**Table 1.** (continued)</caption><tr><td><strong>Organisation and course of the lesson.</strong><br>Pupils work on the floor, divided in teams of three or four. Each team has their own mat and robot Ema<br>Pupils either stand and walk around the mat with the blue panel in their hands while solving the problems or sit around the mat and rotate it on the floor or they just imagine Ema's current direction while programming and can plan a path containing <strong>left</strong> and <strong>right</strong> commands in this way also. Teachers believe that this is mainly how older and more mature pupils work</td><td>Papert [10] refers to this behaviour as <em>body syntonic learning</em>. Thanks to this identification with a robot that they control, learners can plan, execute and debug the program as early as in year one or even earlier</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Pupils' attitudes and atmosphere in class.</strong><br>Pupils like what we do, the atmosphere in the class is great, busy, friendly, working and relaxed<br><em>... sometimes even a pupil who did not do very well in informatics or other subjects will perform well!</em></td><td></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Controlling robot by the panel.</strong> Most of the pupils of all years accepted using the panel without any problems. First, they had to get used to holding it correctly (e.g. not upside down), choosing the right tile and holding it correctly as well (so that, for example, they don't confuse the <strong>back</strong> command with the <strong>forward</strong>, if holding the tile wrongly). Also, some teachers report that some pupils, for a while, had problems with the correct order of the tiles<br>One teacher pointed out that... <em>When Ema has to go to the right, we have to give two commands, in fact - turn right and step forward...</em></td><td>We consider order (in various forms and at various levels) to be one of the key phenomena of informatics. Therefore, it needs to be given corresponding attention in discussions with pupils<br>This surprising remark enabled us to realise that in the PD session, we have to emphasise Ema does not know the command <em>go right</em>. We only have <strong>left</strong> and <strong>right</strong> turns and step <strong>forward</strong> or <strong>backward</strong></td></tr></table>

(continued)
<table><caption>**Table 1.** (continued)</caption><tr><td><strong>Organisation and course of the lesson.</strong><br>Pupils work on the floor, divided in teams of three or four. Each team has their own mat and robot Ema<br>Pupils either stand and walk around the mat with the blue panel in their hands while solving the problems or sit around the mat and rotate it on the floor or they just imagine Ema's current direction while programming and can plan a path containing <strong>left</strong> and <strong>right</strong> commands in this way also. Teachers believe that this is mainly how older and more mature pupils work</td><td>Papert [10] refers to this behaviour as <em>body syntonic learning</em>. Thanks to this identification with a robot that they control, learners can plan, execute and debug the program as early as in year one or even earlier</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Advantages and disadvantages.</strong> When working with the panel, pupils see the program in front of them. As they execute the program, the small LED lights above the commands light up one by one. Pupils can also easily see properties such as the number of commands in the program<br>Working with the panel develops imagination and logical thinking. It helps pupils to quickly find an error in the program and easily correct it<br><em>... I was astonished how, out of eight tiles of a program, pupils (of years 1 and 2) easily identified the one that was incorrect...</em><br>One teacher noted that pupils prefer to work without panels: <em>Working with the panels requires more time; the panel has a limited number of commands</em></td><td>This observation underscores the importance of the explicitly represented program and the opportunity to see the program as an object of our thinking about the problem, Papert [10]. We will get back to this in the Discussion. Unfortunately, we do not have more details. It does, however, support our belief that this research must continue by observing pupils at work with blue panels and interviewing them</td></tr><tr><td><strong>From one command to several.</strong> Pupils controlled Ema using the panel with one tile for just a few seconds and immediately moved on to programming more steps on their own. They understood the principle right away, it was quite natural for them<br>In one case, teachers began the lesson by explaining, then the pupils immediately started using panel with multi commands<br>A small group of pupils kept controlling the robot with one tile but soon they discovered another possibility or saw how others were doing it<br><em>... sometimes they moved from a single tile to the whole program even faster than I wanted...</em></td><td>This approach, however, contradicts the pedagogy of Emil and Ema. Through various activities and tasks, we create situations where pupils identify the need for something new: a tool, a concept, an option or a procedure among others. Soon, they will discover and explore it early on in collaboration with other classmates, scaffolded by their teacher</td></tr></table>
the transition from direct control to programming from a cognitive point of view

to a practically trivial one. This conclusion distinguishes educational robotics, i.e.,

controlling a physical object on a floor mat from controlling a virtual character on a

screen. The panel contributes to this by its design, i.e., by motivating pupils to move

immediately from single-command to multi-command control.

As some of the teachers’ responses are not entirely consistent with this conclusion,
we plan to extend our research by visiting schools, observing lessons in person and
interviewing pupils involved in the process.

**Acknowledgments.** This work has been funded in part by VEGA Slovak Agency under project Productive gradation of computational concepts in programming in primary school 1/0602/20 and APVV under the Contract no. APVV-20-0353.

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