An Implementation of Educational Programming Environment Using Tangible
Materials
Authors: Kato Toshiyasu , Kambayashi Yasushi , Oda Koji 
Published: July 2023

Recently, people started to pay attention on the education using
tangible teaching materials. The field of programming education is not an
exception. Researchers in education have found that tangible teaching
materials improve students' logical thinking ability. Because the tangible
teaching materials make students deepen their understanding by touching them
with their hands and seeing them with their eyes. In other words, they
appeal to students' all five senses. Programming language independent
learning materials are used in several educational institutions around the
world. Programming environments using some kinds of graphics are commonly
used, but they restrict their users' operations due to the abilities of
installed computers and their small screens. To overcome this problem, we
have developed a tangible teaching material for programming education. This
system makes it possible for the users to learn programming by using its
tangible materials for either group education or individual learning. The
purpose of this research is to solve one of the common problems widely seen
among programming learners. That is letting the instructors know the
learners' programming situations in classes. It is difficult for instructors
to collect data about what progress each student makes and what obstacle
makes them be delay. Our system takes advantages of tangible teaching
materials and provides such data for instructors. In this paper, we report
our experiences about the development of a tangible material for programming
education. Since our goal is to support programming classes in higher
educational institutes, our target is how to develop and improve individual
programming methods. This research is a new attempt to support programming
classes with limited time.The student using this tangible teaching materials
is supposed to arrange a set of programming cards. Each card has a QR code
that matches an operation procedure. Upon completion of the arrangement of
QR codes, the student takes a photo of these cards using the camera of a
tablet. The series of QR codes construct a Python program, and it is
executed on the device. The instructor can monitor each student's progress
remotely, since each QR code has annotation that informs the instructor what
program element it is executing so that the instructor can collect detailed
information about the program individual student constructing. The
instructor can classify students into several categories based on the
collected information, then set study points for the students corresponding
to the categories. The collected information contains where the students
failed in their programs and how they tried to correct the errors. Some
corrections are right, and some are not. Then the instructor further
classifies students in the same categories so that the instructor can
recognize each student's weak points and give him or her careful guidance.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of our tangible materials for programming
education, we have conduct numerical experiments over college students. We
have observed 80% of them improve their logical thinking ability. As a
future work, we will implement stronger support features for instructors so
that the instructor can analyze students' common errors and rightly guide
them.