{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.016553067185978577, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007789678675754625, 'mean_word_length': 5.246200607902735, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Mutual Improvement between Teaching Materials and Assessment Tools for K-12 Programming Education

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach to improve teaching materials and assessment tools for K-12 programming education together by creating a virtuous cycle. Improving teaching materials for computing education is in line with the conference theme “Creating a convergence in engineering education and workforce development”. In this research, coding sheets are used as a part of the teaching materials, and the assessment tools are used to assess the algorithmic thinking ability of the students. The assumption here is that there is a mutual impact between the improvement of teaching materials and that of assessment tools. This kind of strategy is important, especially in the setting of elementary school education in Japan in which conducting a pilot study is difficult. In Japan, the new curriculum guidelines were fully implemented in April 2020 in elementary schools and in April 2021 in junior high schools respectively. They will be implemented in April 2022 in high schools. Since the announcement of the new curriculum guidelines, the boards of education in the local governments have been preparing for the programming education in the schools. However, there are still remaining problems, including the shortage of trained teachers and the lack of good assessment tools. In order to remedy the shortage of trained teachers, we designed some coding sheets for the teaching materials consisting of block parts, servo motors, DC-motors, LEDs, and sensors. In our assessment tools which are supposed to assess students' Computational Thinking ability, we included only the questions for assessing algorithmic thinking ability, as there is a limited amount of time for the assessment in schools. We have used our teaching materials and our assessment tools in some elementary schools. Based on the results of the teaching activities, we discuss the strategy to improve the teaching materials and the assessment tools together.