Can Mindfulness Help Primary Education Students to Learn How to Program With an Emotional Learning Companion?

Teaching programming to children has attracted significant research in recent decades. In our previous work, we co-designed the learning companion called Alcody with children between 10–12 years old who had some previous programming knowledge. Alcody is based on Papert’s constructionism theory, interacting with the students in pseudocode and providing recommendations as emotional support. Students using Alcody could significantly increase their scores in a programming test as well as seeming to be happy using the system. However, the relationship between the increase in scores and satisfaction and motivation levels was not explored. Moreover, since the COVID-19 pandemic, children have seemed too distracted and stressed to keep focusing on learning programming. This is why this paper introduces, for the first time in the literature, the use of mindfulness (the quality of being aware of the present moment) to help children focus before their programming sessions. The hypothesis is that by integrating mindfulness into the teaching of programming to children with an emotional learning companion, such as Alcody, the learning of programming concepts and students’ attitudes to learning can be improved. To test the hypothesis, an experiment was carried out with 137 students between 10-12 years old during the 2020 summer, split into a control group (without mindfulness) and a test group (with mindfulness). The 69 students in the test group achieved a significantly higher improvement in their post-test programming scores, and significantly higher satisfaction and motivation levels than the students in the control group. Moreover, students in the test group reported that they liked the experience of practicing mindfulness and that they felt it helped them to focus. It is therefore concluded that integrating mindfulness practices into the teaching of programming to children can be beneficial to increase their scores, satisfaction, and motivation levels.