Abstract—The Japanese government has recently addressed the issue of promoting programming education in elementary/secondary education to develop students’ ability to utilize information. The curriculum guidelines for junior high school and high school, published by the Japanese government, also include programming education for understanding measurement/control systems and developing problem-solving ability. This study developed a visual programming environment called AT, which was implemented in programming classes for novices in some universities and a technical college. With the objective of introducing the AT environment into elementary/secondary programming education, this study also developed some functionalities of AT that offer users intuitive operation capabilities on tablet devices for AT’s editor. We conducted a survey for evaluating the intuitive operation in an actual classroom, and the usability and comprehensibility of the editor were highly evaluated by the students.

Index Terms—Elementary/secondary education, programming education, tablet PC, visual programming environment.

Nao Kono, Hisayoshi Kunimune, and Masaaki Niimura are with Shinshu University, 4-17-1 Wakasato, Nagano, 3808553 Japan (email: kunimune@shinshu-u.ac.jp).
Tatsuki Yamamoto is with Shobi University, 1-1-1 Toyodacho, Kawagoe, Saitama, 3501110 Japan.

Cite: Nao Kono, Hisayoshi Kunimune, Tatsuki Yamamoto, Masaaki Niimura, "Development and Evaluation of Functions for Elementary/Secondary Programming Education: The Visual Programming Environment “AT”," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 13-23, 2017.