Enhancing Programming Ability with Playful Learning and Karel
Stephen Tierney, Alison Wong
Beginner programmers often struggle to understand and trace program execution, which is worsened by underdeveloped debugging and testing skills. Beginners may also lack confidence or are easily demotivated, which can hinder learning. To assist students in developing these skills and build confidence we created a set of playful programming challenges and competition using Karel the Robot. The Karel system provides a 2D “grid world” where the Karel character can move and interact with its environment. The 2D world is visualised for students so that they can immediately see how their program changes the environment step by step as well as the final program state. This is in contrast to traditional languages where learners must develop and maintain a mental model of the program state. This talk will cover our approach, preliminary results and feedback from students showing an increase in confidence and interest in programming. We will also share how this approach can be applied to other learning contexts.
