An Advanced Version of CS Unplugged Activity 2

In line with the global trend toward enhancing education on computer programming, Japan has begun to consider making programming a required subject at the elementary-school level. While traditionally some programming education has been conducted starting at the level of secondary education, this policy would introduce it as a required subject at an earlier stage. The authors are involved in programming education at a “Kosen” school, a unique higher education institution of science and technology in Japan that accepts as students junior-high-school graduates. However, since not a few students consider the subject to be difficult, they are in the process of seeking out effective educational methods for beginning learners of programming. As part of this process, we are carrying out research focused mainly on the continuation of CS Unplugged to full-fledged programming. Previously we proposed a Six-Step Method based on CS Unplugged, and we have put it into practice in the classroom. The six steps are as follows: Step 1: CS Unplugged Activity; Step 2: CS Plugged Activity; Step 3: visualization of the processing; Step 4: extraction of elements of the processing; Step 5: writing Java source code; Step 6: validation through table tracing. However, the CS Unplugged Activity was devised originally for children who had no knowledge of computers. In addition, most of the activities prepared have concerned individual topics, with only weak connections among those topics. Focusing on these points, we devised a more advanced version as an activity connected to full-fledged programming and merging the two topics, important to the initial study, of Activity 1 (Binary Numbers) and Activity 2 (Image Representation). This paper reports the results of using this version in classroom practice.