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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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