SOBIT-Begin, a programming course system for beginners

The purpose of this study is developing a programming course system for a beginners’ class to improve potential abilities of their programming skills and to reduce hesitation that programming is complicated. In Japan, the demand for programming education for beginners will gradually increase since programming was officially added to a mandatory course in primary and secondary schools. We have developed a programming course system for beginners with a robot and Scratch, named SOBIT-Begin. The system consists of customized Scratch on a PC of a user, a ready-made robot, a router and a microcomputer, Raspberry Pi, to communicate between the user PC and the robot. This system employs a visual-based language, Scratch, to reduce potential hesitation. In addition, by setting the degrees of difficulty of a task for the users with a game style, the system is designed so that it can be widely applied to not only schools but also ordinary companies. In this paper, we will describe the configuration of SOBIT-Begin and the new game which is for upper level by reflecting the result of the course we held in the spring semester 2019.