Koding4Kinder: Teaching Computational Thinking to Pupils Using a Combination of Programming and Electronics Platforms

Programming has become a crucial skill in today’s world. Technology and computers are basically part of anything now. President Obama once referred to the importance of children learning programming: “I do not want our young people to just be consumers, I want them to be producers of this technology and to understand it, to feel like they are controlling it, as opposed to it controlling them.” It is thus an increasing need for an individual to know how to write their own programs. With the increasing dependency on computation, one can anticipate such skills being a requirement for most jobs in the coming years. There is a lot of effort done in this area, however most of them focused on either software or hardware track. The aim of this work is to test if using a hybrid approach for teaching K-12 students programming by combining both software and hardware techniques is more effective than using a singleton approach.