We present a theory of the causes of difficulty in children’s creation of informal programs. Ten-year-old children are able to devise such programs to rearrange the order of the cars in trains on a simple railway track with a single siding. According to the theory, they rely on kinematic mental models that simulate the required sequence of steps, and we devised a computer program, mAbducer, which does so too in creating its own programs for such rearrangements. An experiment showed that a simple measure of the complexity of its programs, based on Kolmogorov complexity, predicts ten-year-olds’ difficulty in this task: the measure is the number of words in mAbducer’s programs for solving the rearrangement in a minimal number of moves. Complexity, in turn, reflects the structure of the required programs, which need loops of moves to be repeated, and often moves before and after such a loop. Children’s errors are predictable in both their location and nature. Our results therefore have implications for the assessment and pedagogy of computational thinking.
The causes of difficulty in children’s creation of informal programs
Monica Bucciarelli
;
2022-01-01
Abstract
We present a theory of the causes of difficulty in children’s creation of informal programs. Ten-year-old children are able to devise such programs to rearrange the order of the cars in trains on a simple railway track with a single siding. According to the theory, they rely on kinematic mental models that simulate the required sequence of steps, and we devised a computer program, mAbducer, which does so too in creating its own programs for such rearrangements. An experiment showed that a simple measure of the complexity of its programs, based on Kolmogorov complexity, predicts ten-year-olds’ difficulty in this task: the measure is the number of words in mAbducer’s programs for solving the rearrangement in a minimal number of moves. Complexity, in turn, reflects the structure of the required programs, which need loops of moves to be repeated, and often moves before and after such a loop. Children’s errors are predictable in both their location and nature. Our results therefore have implications for the assessment and pedagogy of computational thinking.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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