Prof. Watson: A Pedagogic Conversational Agent to Teach Programming in Primary Education

Abstract

Teaching programming in Primary Education has recently attracted a great deal of research interest. One global trend is using multimedia languages such as Scratch. However, it was our belief that by using Pedagogic Conversational Agents that dialog with the students, they have to think how to solve given problems and to write the code to solve them. In particular, the MECOPROG methodology was applied to design the student-agent dialog in Prof. Watson. An experiment with 19 students (11−12 years old) was carried out proving the viability of the approach, which shed some light into alternative procedures to teach programming in Primary Education.

Keywords

• pedagogic conversational agent
• programming
• primary education