結合紙本桌遊與電腦系統之程式設計教學環境(2/2)

Nowadays the skill of programming is necessary in many domains. It might not be an ability that is directly related to one's professional, but it is generally agreed that it is useful in everyone's career, for example writing programs to conduct various experiments, carrying out in-depth analysis, and presenting research results. Programming is moving into many of the domains previously dominated by writing and further conceptualized as computational thinking (CT). Nevertheless, learning programming is never easy since not only knowledge but also the way knowledge is applied, i.e. strategies, are necessary for programming. Many mini-languages and visual environments have been developed for learning programming, but they all heavily rely on the use of computers. On the other hand, unplugged activities including board games are much cheaper and realistic for teaching in classrooms. However, the lack of teaching how to think a whole plan due to turn-based style might make existing CT board games not sufficient for learning programming concretely in our opinion. Furthermore, computers are still necessary for teaching programming because of the need of evaluating user programs. This observation led us to propose a programming learning environment consisting of a paper board game along with a single computer system. Since programming is a process of thinking abstraction and composition and thus it is pretty much invisible, we develop a thinking module to visualize leaners' thinking results with a paper board game. This board game can train learners to think a whole plan to deal with all situations in advance rather than making every decision individually. Furthermore, we encourage learners to think as a computer and then evaluate their programs with a computer. In our proposal, every classroom only needs one computer.