Development of Hands-on Teaching Materials for Programming Learning with Robotics Invention System

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In information education, it is well known that many students feel difficulty to acquire programming skills. The one of the reason is that it might not be easy for them to relate source codes to their execution that could be examined only on the display. Such traditional programming style is lacking in 'real experience'. In this study, hands-on robotics practice was introduced for freshmen in programming learning at a Japanese college of Technology. The class was divided into two groups and the practice in a half of semester was repeated by turns. The practice consisted of three stages: robot construction, basic programming, and data acquisition programming. Three stages were set in the practice to learn a robotic mechanism, a basic algorithm, and data acquisition. Exercises were carefully arranged for beginners to learn basic programming algorithms. Student manuals were also newly prepared. How well they understood the contents was investigated by questionnaire at each stage. The result showed that the degree of understanding was greatly advanced as more than a half of the students could understand all the algorithms. We believe that experiences in the present practice would be helpful when they learn other language like C++ or JAVA.