中国科学院自动化研究所机构知识库

With the development of computer technology, children’s programming technology has become increasingly mature. However, the current content and form of children’s programming tools are too singular and do not integrate well with daily life skills. In the era of vigorously advocating environmental protection, it is particularly important to cultivate children’s environmental awareness and ability from an early age. The paper described a new edutainment tool named Clas-Maze, for children in 5–9 years old, which combines tangible programming and living knowledge, such as garbage classification. Clas-Maze consists of three parts: Programming blocks which can be used to construct a program to control the garbage’s route, external camera which can be used to collect the information of programming blocks, and the virtual environment which is the execution interface of the system on the computer. We wanted to explore whether the system is helpful to children in learning garbage classification and programming, and the difference between single and collaborative learning. So we conducted a user experiment with 37 children. The results showed that Clas-Maze can help children learn programming and garbage classification. Single and cooperative programming have their own advantages. In order to cultivate children’s ability of decision-making, communication and cooperation, people can choose cooperative programming