[PYTHON] Difficulty teaching elementary school students real programming

I am currently teaching programming to a fifth grader. The development environment is as follows

Development environment

What you are teaching

The student's request was that he wanted to make his own Minecraft mod. To do that, you need to learn the Java language. However, Java was considered to be a very difficult programming language for elementary school students to learn first. So, first of all, it is easy to understand what you are making in Minecraft, I decided to teach Python as a language with relatively low learning hurdles. I decided to introduce and teach Raspberry Jam Mod as a programming environment for Minecraft + Python.

The content of the study is proceeding according to the following books. Python programming that you can enjoy learning with Minecraft

Please refer to this Wiki etc. for learning history Programming Classroom wiki

Difficulty teaching programming to elementary school students

Now, as for the main subject, it is very difficult to teach programming to elementary school students. Because

For some reason. The child who teaches enjoys Minecraft every day, has a wealth of command knowledge, and has experience in making games with Unity. However, even if you have these prerequisite knowledge, programming is The hurdles are still very high. As a concrete example of how high the hurdles are, I gave the famous FizzBuzz problem as my homework. It takes about a week to complete.

How can I still teach

I'm neither an education expert nor a programming expert (although I'm a college graduate). Therefore, I managed to finish each time by repeating ingenuity. As a device

And so on. Here are some slides created for the lecture as an example.

However, even with all this ingenuity, some children quit because they couldn't keep up with the immorality. Again, programming is that difficult.

What to do in the future

The hurdle can be further lowered because the difficulty level is so high that there will be dropouts. There is the issue of whether to chew and explain. However, it takes several hours to create slides, and before doing it with one hand of the main business, Any further increase in burden is personally severe. Furthermore, it is undeniable that he lacks his own ability. On the other hand, although it is subjective, there is no big problem with the current pace, and considering the balance with the student's academic work. It is highly possible that the style of one hour / week / class assignment and several homework assignments can be widely applied.


I saw the slides, but isn't this a fairly high hurdle? If you have any opinions, please comment.

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