Basic Programming Concepts as Explained for Preschoolers

Abstract

The development of information technologies has formed a socio-economic request to reduce the age at which children can be introduced to programming. After 6 years’ efforts, the authors managed to develop and on a large scale introduce a one-year programming course for preschoolers, which is built on a metaphor of programmed control. During the course development, a set of basic programming concepts was selected and specified to be mastered by preschoolers aged 6+ in the activity-game form. This set of concepts goes back to Seymour Papert's ideas about teaching programming by writing programs that control moving objects using intuitive sets of commands. The main feature of the proposed system of concepts, allow at the initial stage of training to demonstrate and assimilate all the elements of the concept in the real, not in the virtual world. In the picture of the World, which we explain and demonstrate to children, only one function remains at the computer - the execution of the program it has memorized. Everything else happens in the real world. In the real world, an environment is created in which a real robot will move. In the real world, a program is created from tangible objects, which will then be "shown" to the computer so that it stores it in its memory and can then execute it at the command of a human. In the real world, obeying the signals of the computer, the robot performs the work stipulated by the program. This allows you to begin acquaintance with the programming of children from 4 years old, without working individually or collectively with electronic screens, which in today's Russia is prohibited by federal medical authorities in the educational process of children under 5 years old. The course is built on the text-free pictographic programming system PiktoMir developed by Russian Academy of Sciences. The methodological content of the course allows each preschooler to gain experience in the development and debugging of 120-150 simple programs by the end of the course. The final part of the article discusses the authors' plans for the development of a three-year textless programming course, methodologically and instrumentally connected with the primary school programming course.