In the National Institute of Technology (KOSEN),Nara College curriculum, teach programming to students in grades 2-4. The unit of programming is 6 credits in total. Students learn the Java language for the first two years. Students learn C language in the last year. Students may also use other languages, such as python and C#, in class for experiments and exercises.
In this way, in the curriculum of this department, we teach programming firmly, but it cannot be said that students have programming skills. As the cause of this, there are a certain number of students who are not good at programming at the stage of the lower grades. We　consider that students should submit assignments and pass exams instead of actively learning programming.
Therefore, to dispel students' weak perception of programming, on the other hand, for students who have advanced understanding, we will change the tasks according to their proficiency level so that they can challenge more advanced problems. This is possible by having multiple instructors conduct classes, and there were problems such as difficulty in evaluating students by dividing them according to their proficiency level.
Therefore, we gave a lecture using Scratch and the Java language in the programming basic class held in the second grade, which is the first introductory education, and we report the details in this paper.
In this class, the following procedures were carried out with the aim of helping students to understand the control structures that they should learn first: sequential, branching, and repeating.
(1) Visual programming (Scratch)
(2) Java language programming
(3) Exercises and assignments
We teach classes with (1) to (3) as one set.
This was not just a matter of teaching grammar and doing exercises, but to help students understand and maintain their motivation.
We compared and considered the results of classes conducted using this method for the first four years from 2019 to 2022 with classes conducted using only the Java language so far.
Although the time required to teach grammar content was shortened compared to the conventional class method that taught only Java, the grades did not deteriorate compared to before, and it is suitable for classes to learn Java language and C language from the third grade onwards. There were no obstacles.