Kodockly: Using a Tangible Robotic Kit for Teaching Programming

Khaled Mohamed, Yara Dorgham and Nada Sharaf

The German University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt

Keywords:

Robotics, Tangible User Interface, Programming for Children, Computational Thinking, Educational Robots,

STEM.

Abstract:

Programming has recently become one of the most needed skills. This increased the need and the demand

of teaching children programming and computational thinking at early age. This study aims to investigate

how effectively young children can master the foundations of programming based on tangible robotic user

interface. This was accomplished by designing and implementing, Kodockly, an educational robotic kit for

young children aged from 6 to 11. Children can learn three main programming concepts (Sequential, Con-

ditions, and Loops) while playing with the kits. A sample of N=38 children participated in this research.

Kodockly was tested using between-group experimental design to test the effectiveness of the robotic kits to

teach children programming concepts against the normal teaching methods. The results showed a signiﬁcant

difference between the two groups with a p-value<0.05 for the learning gain, the engagement level and the

system usability. Accordingly, using Kodockly as an educational robot is considered to be an effective method

to teach young children basics of programming. Kodockly was built for young individuals to attract them

towards Engineering Education.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, programming, is becoming a fundamental

ﬁeld. Programming has become a very important area

that inspires and encourages. It has become an im-

portant skill in today’s world. Individuals all over the

world are using different types of programmed appli-

cations for different ﬁelds. Everything now depends

basically on technology. This includes health, educa-

tion, ﬁnance and not only computer science. Thus, it

is essential for everyone to know how to write their

own programs. It is also a good practice for chil-

dren to learn these fundamental concepts in their early

childhood (Bers et al., 2013).

Teaching programming concepts and robotics al-

lows children to learn important ideas that help them

understand some of the daily objects that they deal

with (Clements and Gullo, 1984; Kanbul and Uzun-

boylu, 2017). Children can understand ideas from

computer science and engineering when learning pro-

gramming concepts and robotics (Elkin et al., 2016).

Moreover, coding using robots shows the children that

they can create with technology because the robot

moves and behaves based on the commands and the

instructions that the child gives it (Kanbul and Uzun-

boylu, 2017). In addition, robots offer tangible and

playful way for children to engage with both the T

of the technology and the E of the engineering in the

early childhood STEM curricula (Bers et al., 2013).

The child can directly view the impact of his or her

programming commands on the actions of the robot

(Kazakoff and Bers, 2014). Therefore, using robotics,

children engage joyfully with the process of learning

how and why motors and sensors work(Sullivan and

Bers, 2016).

The work presented in this paper mainly fo-

cuses on teaching children programming by build-

ing Kodockly, an interactive programmable robot.

Kodockly uses sensors and motors to teach them the

basics of programming, computational thinking, and

some hardware in a simple and fun way. Kodockly

is programmed using tangible wooden blocks. This

makes the robot an off-screen methodology to teach

programming concept. Robots have been chosen be-

cause they have proven to be an effective methodol-

ogy for teaching children logical thinking and pro-

gramming (Estrada, 2017; Kazakoff and Bers, 2014).

Kodockly aims at teaching its children the basic con-

cepts of computational thinking and programming.

This includes sequential programming, conditional

programming and iterative programming. In addition,

some hardware programming concepts are also cov-

ered. Two versions of the Kodockly were designed.

Kodockly 1.0 targets children in the age range of 6 to

Mohamed, K., Dorgham, Y. and Sharaf, N.

Kodockly: Using a Tangible Robotic Kit for Teaching Programming.

DOI: 10.5220/0010446401370147

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2021) - Volume 1, pages 137-147

ISBN: 978-989-758-502-9

137

8 whereas Kodockly 2.0 targets children aged 8-11.

After ﬁnishing the prototypes, Kodockly was tested

with 38 student. The aim was to know whether the kit

was effective in teaching and whether children found

it enjoyable compared to traditional teaching method-

ologies.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2

shows some of the previous and related work. Sec-

tion 3 shows the different design details of Kodockly.

Section 4 discusses the different stages and the de-

sign of the experiment. In Section 5, the results of the

experiment are discussed. We ﬁnally conclude with

directions to future work.

2 RELATED WORK

A lot of related work has been carried out in the

area of programming for young children. They used

various teaching methods. Some work was done in

the form of serious games that are implemented to

teach children computational thinking and program-

ming skills (Kazimoglu et al., 2012; 2, ). Exam-

ples of these work are Scratch, KIBO, and Cubetto.

Scratch is a block-based visual programming game

that teaches some basics of programming. Students

collect the blocks appropriately by using drag and

drop to create their desired program or game (Armoni

et al., 2015). It allows the children to learn program-

ming by allowing them to build games through build-

ing blocks of code which is written in a simpliﬁed

natural language (Kalelio

glu and G

ulbahar, 2014).

KIBO is a robotic kit that is designed for young chil-

dren between 4-7 years. It allows the children to cre-

ate and design their own robot (Elkin et al., 2016).

Children program the robot using tangible code made

of wooden blocks without working with any form of

screens. Cubetto is a robot that is made of tactile and

hard-wearing wood along with a board. It works by

placing the blocks on the board to tell Cubetto where

to go on the mat (Anzo

ategui et al., 2017). Differ-

ent colors and shapes of the blocks indicate different

actions of Cubetto. It is made for the age of 3 to 6.

Problem. The struggle is that most of the avail-

able ways to teach children programming concepts

are screen related like Scratch. Screens are now in-

vading our world without any restrictions. Children

became attached to their screens more than human be-

ings. All sorts of entertainments now became screen

related and this is very dangerous on young children

taking them towards many side effects like obesity,

laziness, sleep problems and autism. In addition, the

available robotic kits have a limited number of sensors

and functionalities like KIBO which uses 2 wheels,

motors, distance sensor, sound sensor, light sensor,

and a lantern for light output in its advanced version.

In addition, this advanced version of KIBO uses only

21 wooden blocks which minimum down its function-

alities. Accordingly, children do not have a wide va-

riety of options to program the robot. Furthermore,

KIBO does not allow the children to view or edit the

scanned program which makes it boring and frustrat-

ing for children to repeat all over again if they scanned

something wrong. Moreover, some of the available

robotic kits do not provide advanced programming

concepts for children like Cubetto which do not sup-

port the if-conditional concept in programming.

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect

of using robotic kits in teaching children program-

ming concepts compared to the traditional face-to-

face learning methods. The goal is to examine the

result of using IOT (Internet of Things) systems that

are embedded with sensors, software, electronics, and

connectivity in helping the children to understand the

fundamentals of programming at young age.

3 DESIGN AND

IMPLEMENTATION

Two different versions of Kodockly robot were de-

signed and implemented to support two different age

groups. Kodockly 1.0 was designed for young chil-

dren aging between 6-8 years while Kodockly 2.0 was

designed for children aging between 8-11 years.

The robots are designed to be programmed using

TUI (Tangible User Interface) which is represented

in the wooden programmable blocks . The child can

scan the wooden blocks (command or program) that

he/she wants to execute in order. Tangible wooden

blocks are used instead of GUI (Graphical User Inter-

face), which relies on pictures and words on a com-

puter screen like drag-and-drop, because of many rea-

sons (Horn et al., 2009; Strawhacker et al., 2013;

Wyeth and Purchase, 2002):

• More fun

• More learn-able and enjoyable.

• Improves problem solving behavior.

• Easier for the children than holding a mouse for

dragging and dropping.

• Children seem to be more involved.

• Blocks are familiar and playful objects.

• Ability to see, touch, organize and assemble the

commands.

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• children can learn and think best when playing,

moving, building and engaging with concrete ob-

jects.

As a result, the robots are programmed using

wooden programming blocks without the use of a

computer, tablet or any other form of a screen. These

wooden blocks are embedded with electronic identi-

ﬁcation cards, to uniquely identify each block. Scan-

ners installed in the two robots allow the children to

scan the invisible ID cards of the programming blocks

and send their program to the corresponding robot

to perform their desired function. When the child

wants to design a series of actions to let the robot per-

form, the child will assemble the program as a line of

wooden programming blocks, scan each block by or-

der using the embedded scanner, and watch the robot

performing the desired functions.

3.1 Hardware System Architecture of

Kodockly 1.0 and 2.0

3.1.1 Micro-controller

Any electronic system must have MCU (Micro-

Controller Unit) to operate. A micro-controller is a

small computer on a single integrated circuit( a set of

electronic circuits on one small ﬂat piece or a chip of

semiconductor material that is normally silicon). A

micro-controller contains at least one CPU (processor

cores), memory, and programmable input/output pe-

ripherals to be used in embedded applications. These

robotic kits are implemented based on the Arduino

board. The Arduino board is equipped with a micro-

controller and sets of pins that are used to interface

the sensors and the shields used by the robots. The

robots were implemented using two different types of

Arduino boards to share the workload (Arduino Mega

and Arduino Uno).

3.1.2 Chassis and Motors

The robots consist of wooden chassis that is con-

nected to four wheels to enable the movement of the

robots in different directions. Each wheel is con-

nected to a DC motor so that it can be activated or

deactivated separately. All the DC motors are con-

nected to H-bridge, an electronic circuit that switches

the polarity of a voltage applied to a motor, to allow

the DC motors to run forward or backward.

3.1.3 Scanner of the Blocks

To be able to scan the programmable blocks that

the child sorts them, a scanner is embedded in each

robot that can reads RFID (radio-frequency identiﬁca-

tion) cards. These cards are invisibly attached to the

wooden blocks that are associated with each robot.

Each card is programmed to do a speciﬁc function.

Once the robot ﬁnishes scanning the program, it will

translate internally the scanned blocks into some pro-

gram or commands that the robot can execute and per-

form.

3.1.4 Color Detection

To let the robot identify different colors, a color sen-

sor is used where it detects the color of the surface in

RGB (red, green, blue) scale.

3.1.5 Light Detection

Light and dark rooms can be recognized using a

photo-resistor or LDR (light-dependent resistor). Us-

ing this resistor, it can read the light intensity of the

surrounding room, and based on the reading, it can

detect whether the room is dark or bright.

3.2 Kodockly 1.0

Kodockly 1.0 is a robot that is programmed by the

children using wooden blocks shown in ﬁgure 3.

The functionality of each block is shown in ﬁgure 4.

Kodockly 1.0 can be used along with a 3D wooden

Maze to teach young children basics of programming

in a kind of a game as shown in ﬁgure 1. The game is

composed of levels. Each level is introducing a new

programming concept; each level has sub-levels as the

maze is dynamic so different mazes can be done as the

inner parts of the maze can be changed. Accordingly,

each concept can be practiced many times through

the sub levels, and children will not get the chance

to memorize the answers. The game is focusing on

three concepts sequential, conditional and loops.

Figure 1: Kodockly 1.0 along with the wooden maze.

Kodockly: Using a Tangible Robotic Kit for Teaching Programming

139

The game idea is basically to get the robot out of

the maze while dealing with different cases in each

level. Each level gets harder than the one before it and

introduces much more advanced programming con-

cepts. The game goes as follows: after scanning all

the blocks in order, the execution green button should

be pressed to let the car start executing the scanned

blocks as shown in ﬁgure 2. The start block should be

scanned the ﬁrst one if it is not the case the car will not

move and an error message will be displayed on the

screen. In addition, the end block should be scanned

at the end. If it is not the case the car will not move

and an error message will be displayed on the screen.

In both cases the child should start all over again by

pressing the reset button as shown in ﬁgure 2. This

is used to introduce the idea that any program should

have a start and end statements. To make the game

Figure 2: Kodockly 1.0 buttons.

more interesting and to introduce a new concept, the

children have to collect some cards from the maze

while passing through it. After ﬁnishing the game,

the children have to sort these cards. These cards are

parts of a ﬂow chart, so the child should sort them in

the way that would give the ﬂow chart of the program

that helped the robot to get out of the maze. The LCD

screen will be displaying every action happening to

the robot while it is executing.

Components of Kodockly 1.0. Kodockly 1.0 used

the color sensor to detect the colors of the tiles in the

maze to detect the obstacles. The photo resistor used

to detect the light intensity to know when the robot

enters a tunnel in the maze. An SD card is added to

add audio ﬁles to the project so the speaker can play

them when needed. In addition, the keypad is used

to enter the loop count. An LCD is used as a kind of

feedback for the children to display on it every action

that is happening or any error messages. Furthermore,

Figure 3: Kodockly 1.0 blocks.

Figure 4: Functionalities of the wooden blocks of Kodockly

1.0

a led is used as a feedback for scanning the blocks.

Furthermore, an object detector sensor was attached

in the kit to detect if there is obstacle in front of the

robot to make sure that the robot will not crash into

the walls of the maze.

3.2.1 Game Levels

Level One. This level aims to introduce the sequen-

tial concept in a fun way. The children are asked to

let the robot moves to a certain position in the maze

or moves out of it through a series of steps with no re-

strictions. The blocks that can be used by the children

in this level are six blocks only which are Forward,

Backward, Right, Left, Start and End. Initially, level

one is the activated level, but there is a button shown

in ﬁgure 2 that is used to activate level one if another

level is chosen and level one is needed again. In this

level, each block can be scanned more than once.

Level Two. Level two includes the same sequential

concept as level one, but the condition concept will be

introduced. The conditions are applied by adding dif-

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ferent obstacles in the maze in the path of the robot.

Obstacles added in the game are tunnel, blue tiles and

red tiles. The robot will not be able to pass these ob-

stacles using the six blocks used in level one only, so

this level uses 7 more blocks than level one. The new

blocks used in this level are if, blue tile detected, red

tile detected, tunnel detected, turn blue led on, turn

red led on and turn tunnel led on along with the blocks

of level one. In level two, the robot will not be able to

pass the blue tile if the blue led is not turned on and

will not be able to pass the red tile if the red led is not

turned on and in order to pass the tunnel, the tunnel

led must be turned on. Accordingly, this level intro-

duced the conditions concept. This level is activated

using a black button shown in ﬁgure 2.

Level Three. Level three includes the same obsta-

cles used in level two, but here the concept of loops

will be introduced. Accordingly, a restriction is added

that each block cannot be scanned more than three

times at this level. This restriction forced the children

to use the two new blocks of this level to solve the

maze which are repeat and end repeat. Any blocks

scanned after the repeat block and before the end re-

peat block will be repeated as many as the loop count

that was entered using the keypad. This level is acti-

vated using a button shown in ﬁgure 2.

3.3 Kodockly 2.0

Regarding the older age group, Kodockly 2.0 was de-

signed and implemented to teach these children ba-

sics of programming, and sensors based computa-

tional thinking. This robotic kit uses a wide variety of

advanced types of sensors, motors, and actuators that

the children encounter in their daily life to do more

complicated functions. The children can program this

kit using TUI (Tangible User Interface) which is rep-

resented in wooden programmable blocks. Figures 5

and 6 show Kodockly 2.0 robotic kit.

Components of Kodockly 2.0. There are several

electronic components that are used in Kodockly 2.0

to broaden the functionalities in order to help children

learn the programming concepts in an interactive way.

3.3.1 Object Detection

In order to let the robot detects whether there is an ob-

ject in front of it or not, an ultrasonic sensor is used.

This sensor measures the distance by using ultrasonic

waves. The ultrasonic waves are emitted from the

head of the sensor, and the reﬂected waves are re-

ceived back from the target. The ultrasonic sensor

Figure 5: Kodockly 2.0 along with its programmable

blocks.

Figure 6: Kodockly 2.0 front view.

measures the distance to the target by measuring the

time between the emission and reception.

3.3.2 Color Detection

The used color sensor in Kodockly 2.0 is programmed

to differentiate between 5 different colors which are:

red, green, yellow, orange and blue.

3.3.3 Clap Detection

The robot can recognize claps using the sound sensor

that is embedded. The set point level of the sensor is

adjusted using a potentiometer that is located at the

back of the sensor to spot claps only.

Kodockly: Using a Tangible Robotic Kit for Teaching Programming

141

3.3.4 Head Sensing and Orientation

The robot has a head that is attached to a servo mo-

tor, a motor which allows the control of the angle of

rotation and speed of rotation. This motor is used in

order to let the head rotate to the right, rotate to the

left or look forward. In addition, three touch sensors

are placed to the head of the robot. One on the right,

one on the left, and one in the middle of the head to

detect any touch happens to any part of the head.

3.3.5 Line Tracking

In order to be able to track black lines, line follower

sensor is used. The robot uses two-line follower sen-

sors to be able to follow black lines on the ﬂoor. The

idea of having two sensors not only one is that each

one is placed near the front wheels (one at the right

and one at the left). If the right sensor detects that it is

over a black line now, so the robot has to turn slightly

right. Same thing happens when the left sensor de-

tects a black line, the robot has to turn slightly left to

adjust its orientation.

3.3.6 Light Output

Five different LEDs (Light-Emitting Diodes) are

added. Each one has a speciﬁc color. The colors of

the embedded LEDs are red, green, yellow, orange,

and blue. They can be programmed to turn on, ﬂash,

or turn off.

3.3.7 Sounds

In order to produce sounds, a buzzer is added so that

it can be programmed to beep. In addition, a speaker

is added to provide more interaction with the child

who is using this kit. For example, once any block is

scanned, a voice is played through the speaker to tell

the child which block is scanned. In addition, when

the robot executes the scanned program, the robot

tells the child through the speaker what it is going to

do right now. It also says what it is checking for if

there was conditions, whether the program structure

is correct or not, and ﬁnally some tips can be played

to the child if the program structure was incorrect to

guide him to the part in the scanned program that has

errors.

3.3.8 Feedback

An LCD screen is added to the robot to display some

important tips and messages like displaying what the

robot is executing now, what condition is the robot

checking, was the condition satisﬁed or not, the loop

count if there was a repetition in the designed pro-

gram, an external event that the robot is waiting for,

and whether the structure of the scanned program is

correct or not.

3.3.9 Robot Control

In order to make things easier for young children, 3

buttons are added to the robot. The green button is

used to let the robot start executing what it scanned.

When the child ﬁnishes scanning, he/she will press on

the start execution button to see the robot functioning.

The robot will not function unless the code structure is

correct. The black button is used for help. If the pro-

gram that the child has scanned contains some errors,

the robot will not function, and the child will have the

chance to use this help button. On pressing the help

button, a speciﬁc help tip will be played through the

speaker that will guide the child to the part in the pro-

gram that contains the error. Accordingly, the child

can know what is wrong, and what is preventing the

robot from executing the program. The last button

is used to reset all the robot to its default settings.

Usually this button is pressed to start scanning a new

program. Moreover, to enter a counter for repetitions

and loops, an infrared receiver, and infrared remote

control are used. The infrared receiver receives the

signals which are transmitted by the remote, decodes

these signals to a number, and then uses this num-

ber as a counter to do repetitions. Moreover, there

is a mode in the robot that can be activated through

a button to display and edit the scanned program on

the screen with the help of three other buttons (next

instruction, previous instruction, and delete instruc-

tion).

Functionalities of Kodockly 2.0. The child has the

opportunity to select what he/she wants the robot to

do. The child can make a program of whatever num-

ber of wooden blocks he wants from the available

blocks. Forty wooden blocks were built and associ-

ated with this robotic kit as shown in ﬁgure 7. Each

of the available wooden blocks is programmed to do

a deﬁnite function. Figures 8 and 9 explain the func-

tionality of each block. These programmable blocks

cover the three programming concepts which are se-

quential programming, conditional programming, it-

eration programming.

4 EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

The work done in this paper studies the effect of using

educational robots to teach young children the main

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Figure 7: Kodockly 2.0 blocks.

Figure 8: Available Blocks Part I.

concepts of programming compared to the traditional

learning methods. The aim of the experiment is to

prove or reject the null hypothesis. The null hypothe-

sis states that there is no difference between teaching

children programming using the robots and using the

traditional methods. The ﬁrst hypothesis,H1 , claims

that there is no difference in the learning gain between

the children who used the robots and those who used

Figure 9: Available Blocks Part II.

the traditional methods. The second hypothesis,H2 ,

states that there is no difference in the engagement

level of the children who used the robots and those

who used the traditional methods. The third hypothe-

sis,H3 , states that there is no difference in the system

usability of the robots and the traditional methods.

4.1 Focus Group

A focus group was held by the help of a school before

starting the experiment. A focus group is a group of

children trying out the robotic kits before starting the

testing phase. The focus group is made to know the

opinion of the children regarding the kits and if there

are any modiﬁcations or improvements that should be

done to make them better. The school provided ﬁve

students for each age group to try the kits. Figure 10

shows one of the children of the focus group trying

the kit.

4.1.1 Kodockly 1.0

The ﬁve children with the younger age tried Kodockly

1.0. After trying it with the wooden maze, the chil-

dren said that they are allowed to make only one loop

in the game. Consequently, a lot of the mazes could

not be solved in level three. Moreover, the feedback

of scanning the blocks which is ﬂashing the led was

Kodockly: Using a Tangible Robotic Kit for Teaching Programming

143

Figure 10: Focus group.

very fast, so some children did not notice that a block

was scanned even if it was scanned. According to the

comments of the children, the robot was modiﬁed to

allow the children to make three different loops with

three different loop counts. Furthermore, the feed-

back of the scanning was modiﬁed to make the led

ﬂash longer time, so the children could notice it when

it ﬂashes.

4.1.2 Kodockly 2.0

The ﬁve children with the older age tried the other

version of Kodockly. The children said that the robot

is taking much time to execute every block. Meaning

that there was some time delay between executing the

function of the block and the execution of the follow-

ing one. This was solved by decreasing the delay time

between the execution of each block. Another com-

ment is that the connections of the robot (including

the wiring and boards) must be totally covered and

invisible. This was supposed to be done before con-

ducting the focus group, but the lack of time did not

allow to make it then. However, the robot was totally

covered, and connections were all hidden before do-

ing the experiment.

4.2 Participants

Thirty Eight children participated in this experiment.

They were divided into two groups according to their

age group, Group A and Group B. Group A consisted

of 22 children aging from 6 to 8 years while group

B consisted of 16 children aging from 8 to 11 years.

Each of the two groups (A & B) were divided into two

sub-groups, experimental group (A1, B1) and control

group (A2, B2). The experimental groups used the

kits, while the control groups were exposed to tradi-

tional learning methods. Regarding the two exper-

imental groups, group A1 tried Kodockly 1.0 while

group B1 tried Kodockly 2.0. There were no any cri-

teria in the selection of the children. However, for en-

suring the experimental homogeneity, everyone must

not have any previous programming experience.

4.3 Measures

4.3.1 Learning Gain Test

The learning gain is how much the child learned from

the activity made. In order to quantify the learn-

ing gain, pre and post tests were used. These tests

aim to measure the variation between the learning re-

sults of the group participants exposed to the tradi-

tional learning methods and the other group exposed

to the educational robots. The tests were different for

each age group. The test of group A, children ag-

ing from 6 to 8, contained three different questions

one for each level or concept(sequential, conditions,

and loops). The test was three mazes on papers with

the theme of Tom and Jerry carton and the child is

asked to solve them through some steps. The test of

group B, children aging from 8 to 11, is a short story

with a problem to solve. The problem targets the

three programming concepts (sequential, conditions,

and loops) however in more advanced level in addi-

tion to some hardware concepts. The children have

the same 40 blocks printed with the test sheet to num-

ber them in order to solve the problem. The tests were

solved twice by each child one time before the activity

and one time after the activity to calculate the infor-

mation gained throughout the activity.

4.3.2 Engagement Level Test

Engagement is the concept of how the person is being

committed to something. Several factors deﬁne the

engagement while learning like fun, control, excite-

ment, enjoyment, interest, attention, and enthusiasm.

This test is used to quantify the engagement level of

each child.

4.3.3 System Usability Scale

The system usability test is used to measure how us-

able the system is. The system usability is measured

through different factors like satisfaction of the user.

A system is considered usable if it is efﬁcient, satis-

fying and intuitive.

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4.4 Procedure

Each child in the two groups was experimented indi-

vidually. Every child was given 45 minutes session to

ﬁnish the whole experiment. The process of the ex-

periment consisted of 4 phases. The ﬁrst phase was a

hard-copied pre-test that the child tries to answer it in

10 minutes. Once the 10 minutes have ﬁnished, and

whether the child ﬁnished solving the pre-test or not,

the second phase of the experiment starts which lasts

for 25-30 minutes. This phase differs depending on

the group. Group A1 children were introduced to the

programming concepts using Kodockly 1.0. Group

B1 children were introduced to the sensors available

in the robot and learn the three programming con-

cepts by engaging with Kodockly 2.0, knowing how it

works, how it is programmed, and physically realiz-

ing the function of each wooden block. On the other

hand, the children in the control groups (Groups A2

and B2) sit and listen to explanations on the board for

the same programming concepts. Last but not least,

during phase three which lasts for 10 minutes, the par-

ticipants of all groups (A1, A2, B1, B2) were asked

to solve the post-test that is assigned to their group,

which is the same test that was given for them at the

beginning of the session to ensure that both tests have

the same difﬁculty level and to know how much the

children learned. Finally, they are requested to ﬁll in

the standardized engagement level and system usabil-

ity scale questionnaires in the last 5 minutes. Figures

11 and 12 show two children trying the two versions

of Kodockly.

Figure 11: Testing Kodockly 1.0.

Figure 12: Testing Kodockly 2.0.

5 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The learning gain, engagement level, and system us-

ability scale were measured after using the corre-

sponding learning approach to compare between both

learning methods. In this section, the results of all

the previous tests that have been conducted during

the experiment are reported and analyzed using an

independent sample t-test to clarify whether the two

groups (experimental and control groups) are signiﬁ-

cantly different or not.

5.1 Learning Gain Test Results

After analyzing the results, it was shown that the

learning gain of the two experimental groups (the

groups that used the kits) were signiﬁcantly higher

than the learning gain of the two control groups (the

groups that were taught using traditional learning

methods) with p-value<0.05 as shown in tables 1 and

2. This rejects the hypothesis which stated that there

is no difference in the learning gain between teaching

programming using the traditional learning methods

and teaching programming using the robots (H1).

Table 1: Independent t-test results of the learning gain.

Group Type N Mean Standard

Devia-

tion

A1 Exp. 12 14.0833 6.81520

A2 Control 10 3.7000 6.66750

B1 Exp. 8 6.9375 2.11183

B2 Control 8 4.3750 1.92261

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145

Table 2: Independent t-test results of the learning gain.

Group t p df

A 3.593 0.002 20

B 2.538 0.024 14

5.2 Engagement Level Test Results

The results of the independent t-test showed that en-

gagement level of the participants of both experimen-

tal groups were signiﬁcantly higher than that of the

control groups with p-value<0.05 as shown in tables

3 and 4. This rejects the hypothesis which stated that

there is no difference in the engagement level between

the usage of the robots and the traditional learning

methods (H2).

Table 3: Independent t-test results of the engagement level.

Group Type N Mean Standard

Devia-

tion

A1 Exp. 12 4.1917 0.56481

A2 Control 10 3.1190 0.73237

B1 Exp. 8 4.1525 0.43657

B2 Control 8 2.9275 0.76999

Table 4: Independent t-test results of the engagement level.

Group t p df

A 3.880 0.001 20

B 3.914 0.002 14

5.3 System Usability Scale Results

The analysis of the results demonstrated that the

usability of both robotic kits were signiﬁcantly

higher than the traditional learning classroom with p-

value<0.05 as shown in tables 5 and 6. This rejects

the hypothesis which stated that there is no difference

in the system usability of the robots and that of the

traditional learning methods (H3).

Table 5: Independent t-test results of the system usability.

Group Type N Mean Standard

Devia-

tion

A1 Exp. 12 4.1417 0.51250

A2 Control 10 3.1400 0.69793

B1 Exp. 8 4.0 0.48697

B2 Control 8 2.8750 0.64973

Table 6: Independent t-test results of the system usability.

Group t p df

A 3.879 0.001 20

B 3.919 0.002 14

6 CONCLUSION

Studies show that technology is a very strong educa-

tional tool. The integration of technology in educa-

tion can improve the learning process and the results

of the students. It also helps in making learning more

meaningful, easier, and enjoyable. Robotics and pro-

gramming offer a new and exciting way to address the

T of the technology and the E of the engineering that

are most neglected in early childhood STEM educa-

tion.

The work presented in this paper was to imple-

ment two educational robots for young children ag-

ing from 6-8 and from 8-11. These two educational

robots teach the three main programming concepts

(sequential, Conditions, loops) along with some hard-

ware without the use of any computers or screen-time.

The children can program these robots using tangible

programmable wooden blocks. The primary objective

of this study is to test the effective use of that educa-

tional robots in teaching children basics of program-

ming, computational thinking, and hardware. This re-

search demonstrated that young children can master

the foundational concepts regarding programming a

robot in addition to complex programming concepts

such as loops and conditional statements. Kodockly

kits were proven to be more effective and enjoyable

compared to traditional methods.

This study investigated short-term results, so the

future step is to extend the research and test the re-

sults in a long-term study. In addition, new sensors

can be added as well as new programming blocks to

expand the functionalities of the robots. Moreover,

the kits need to tackle more advanced concepts like

nested if-statements and nested loops. Furthermore,

another version of Kodockly could be made for visu-

ally impaired children to give them the opportunity to

learn the basics of programming in an interactive way

that they could understand.

In the future, we also aim to use Kodockly to

teach concepts other than computational thinking.

We will also embed adaptive debugging features into

Kodockly.

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7 SELECTION AND

PARTICIPATION OF

CHILDREN

The children that participated in the study were ran-

domly selected. We have posted an announcement

about a computational day and we invited children

whose parents signed up. The setting was a fun one

with different stations of games with different aims

and technologies. The platform presented in this pa-

per was one of the stations.

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