Kart-ON: affordable early programming education with shared smartphones and easy-to-find materials

Abstract

Programming education has become an integral part of the primary school curriculum. However, most programming practices rely heavily on computers and electronics which causes inequalities across contexts with different socioeconomic levels. This demo introduces a new and convenient way of using tangibles for coding in classrooms. Our programming environment, Kart-ON, is designed as an affordable means to increase collaboration among students and decrease dependency on screen-based interfaces. Kart-ON is a tangible programming language that uses everyday objects such as paper, pen, fabrics as programming objects and employs a mobile phone as the compiler. Our preliminary studies with children (n=16, mage=12) show that Kart-ON boosts active and collaborative student participation in the tangible programming task, which is especially valuable in crowded classrooms with limited access to computational devices.