Research on Support System for Programmatic Thinking Based on Metacognition of Instructional Interaction

In Japan, programming education has been mandated in elementary, junior high, and high school curricula since the publication of the Courses of Study in 2020. In particular, elementary school programming education prioritizes the development of logical thinking skills, focusing on programming thinking, such as problem identification and action decomposition, rather than mere coding proficiency. This study aims to design a training system that enhances logical thinking skills through instructional dialogues. In the proposed system, users provide instructions to a virtual robot via dialogues, and the robot executes actions accordingly. Subsequently, users can review the robot's movements in the virtual space. Essentially, the proposed system offers metacognition, which serves as objective feedback, enabling users to enhance their logical thinking abilities. To assess the effectiveness of our system, we conducted two tests: pretests and posttests following the use of the system, and the results confirmed its efficacy.