Teaching the sequential programming concept using a robotic arm in an interactive museum

Abstract

Technology and Computer Science are increasingly present in today's education and teaching programming is not only restricted to students interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) disciplines, as computational thinking is useful in many day-to-day problems. In this paper we study how students of high school can put in practice transversal concepts by learning the sequential programming concept. We analyze their learning process by asking them to code a simple program that solves a concrete problem: perform simple and immersive tasks using a physical robot in an interactive museum. The experiment offers us some results that should be confirmed with more participants, but it seems that the ages from 13 to 15 years old are crucial to gain knowledge and skills to apply concepts of their studies on using sequential programming to interact with a robotic arm.