Pic2Program - an Educational Android Application Teaching Computational Thinking
Matthias Utesch, Nilüfer Faizan, Helmut Krcmar, Robert Heininger
Abstract
Digital tools have become more essential in education and business areas these days and it is important to start in the early stages of education, e.g. already in the preschool stage. This paper describes the development and pilot testing of an Android based serious gaming App for mobile devices called Pic2Program. The App aims to teach children the basics of Computational Thinking (CT) in a playful way. The gameplay expects the young children to steer successfully their in-game character with the help of an intuitive symbol language through a set of increasingly complex mazes. The children may even draw sets of symbols by hand thus develop a basic program. Pic2Programs image recognition module will then process these symbols by first photographing them with an Android device and then using a neural network to map the photos to program instructions. The effectivity of Pic2Program on learning CT has been evaluated by a designed course for 9 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sup> , graders. The results show that students find the App well-structured and help them to understand the basics of programming.