Teaching Arduino robotics programming for elementary school students: experience report

Abstract

The paper reports the experiences of teaching programming for the Arduino platform, through a course designed for Elementary School II students belonging to 9 (nine) public schools in the city of Curitiba, covering 117 students from the 5th to 9th grade . These students are part of groups that participate in robotics competitions on a regular basis, however without being familiar with the Arduino platform in general. During the course, the students were observed and the learning capacity of the students was verified in a very short time, as well as the difficulties in the assimilation of the basic concepts of programming, which were presented incrementally and focusing on the proposition of challenges from basic notions. The use of the simulator for the programming tasks facilitated the transition from the form of visual programming, of which the students already had certain knowledge, for a more textual programming. It is also tried to show how the programming learning can help in the constitution of the formal thought from the concrete. It was evidenced the motivating character that the robotic activities provide to the learning process and that, in turn, can serve as a facilitator for the introduction of more complex concepts related to programming languages.