## 1 Background  
The cultivation of information technology abilities has been an educational goal to which all countries in the world have attached importance. For example, in 2016, the United States proposed the plan of Computer Science for All [1] and invested USD 4 billion to promote programming courses in seven of the largest school districts in the United States, with the aim of motivating students from kindergarten to high school to learn information science and to cultivate an ability to create a digital economy [2]. In addition, the American College Board introduced the AP Computer Science Principles for Advanced High School Computer Science Courses, which focuses on the application of information technology and programming problem-solving [3]. Many advanced developing countries around the world, including 15 countries in Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, and many others, have officially incorporated programming into their school curriculum. In 2018, Taiwan also included the learning of \"computational thinking\" and \"programming language\" into the curriculum of science and technology [4] in the general outline of its 12-year national basic education curriculum. It is obvious that the cultivation of programming abilities has become one of the important indicators of all stages of education.  
Many studies have pointed out that learning programming can cultivate high-level problem-solving abilities in students and can help them develop their career in the future [5]. However, programming is a difficult subject to teach and to learn in a technical high school. Traditional programming teaching focuses too much on syntactical teaching, which makes it easy for beginners to fall into the trial-and-error way of piecing together programs [6]. Most students at the beginning of learning programming often encounter difficulties in syntax and program concepts due to the huge and complex syntactical structure of general programming language, resulting in difficulties and frustration for program beginners [7]. Therefore, trying to use different teaching methods or designing diversified course contents to enhance the effectiveness of students' learning of programming is an important topic of educational institutions in various countries.  
Design-based learning (DBL), which is often used in the teaching field, presently emphasizes design thinking, hands-on practice, and problem-solving abilities. The repeated thinking, practical activities, and problem-solving process of DBL conform to the teaching objectives of a physical computing programming course [8]. Moreover, in addition to the teaching of Scratch programming, the design of the information course is more integrated into the application of Arduino-related open hardware. From program education originally operated by computer software to the implementation experience imported into hardware, the programming of an information course achieves a real interactive effect through the control of various sensors and acousto-optic components [9; 10]. Therefore, the integration of design thinking and physical computing, focusing learning activities on solving complex tasks and producing solutions to future problems [11], as the main axis of teaching and students' learning in this study is expected to achieve good results. In view of this, this study aims to determine the impact of the integration of Arduino, which applies DBL and a physical computing strategy, in a technical high school programming project course on the cultivation of coding literacy in technical high school students.