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Entering the car park - Primary pupils' spontaneous understanding of programmed control systems in their daily life environment
Volume 24, Issue 1 (2025), pp. 77–97
Gerard Dummer   Elwin Savelsbergh   Paul Drijvers  

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https://doi.org/10.15388/infedu.2025.03
Pub. online: 2 December 2024      Type: Article      Open accessOpen Access

Published
2 December 2024

Abstract

Programmed control systems are ubiquitous in the present-day world. In current educational practice, however, these systems are hardly being addressed, and little is known about children’s spontaneous understandings about such systems. Therefore, we explored pupils’ understandings prior to instruction in three concrete settings: a car park, an elevator, and an autonomous robot. We analysed written responses from 49 Grade 3 (aged 7 to 10) and Grade 6 pupils (aged 10 to 13) to assess their understandings from two perspectives: the user and the system programmer perspective. Results indicate that most pupils were capable describing programmed systems from a user perspective point of view but found it hard to describe the system programmer perspective. Substantial differences were found between the contexts. The car park context evoked richer descriptions for the user perspective and the system programmer perspective in comparison to the elevator and autonomous robot contexts.

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Open access article under the CC BY license.

Keywords
Physical Computing Primary Education Programmed Control Systems Programming User perspective System programmer perspective

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INFORMATICS IN EDUCATION

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