Abstract—Programming education through visual
programming language has been introduced in many elementary
schools. And lately, the number of robots for programming
keeps increasing. It is becoming pervasive to see elementary
school kids to construct their own robots, then make them move
by the visual language programming. Undoubtedly it is essential
to measure students’ learning motivation and degree of
understanding towards robot programming through visual
language itself before implementing it in various subjects as a
general academic routine. The methodology is conduct the class
for the robot programming to elementary school kids, and after
that a question paper investigation was conducted. And in our
measurement, we found that by programming, both the learning
motivation and the degree of understanding have tremendously
increased. Thus, our hypothesis is, if students’ learning
motivation and understanding decrease when programming
education is applied in different subjects, the teaching
curriculums should be revised.
Index Terms—Programming, robot, visual programming
language, robot programming.
H. K. Author is with the Yamagata University, Institute of Arts and
Sciences, Yamagata, Japan (e-mail: kanoh@pbd.kj.yamagata-u.ac.jp).
Cite: H. Kanoh, "The Learning Motivation and Understanding towards Programming Education of Elementary School Students in Japan," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 8, no. 12, pp. 855-860, 2018.