Teaching material to support students' understanding of programming in technology education

This item constitutes the teaching material that came out of a study on teaching programming as part of technology education in lower secondary education, and which is further discussed in a trade journal paper. In the study, we discuss how we have used results from a small research project on programming to develop the teaching within the subject of technology. In the research project, we observed that students employed various strategies when programming a robot to follow a curved line, and that these strategies were differently successful in solving the task. The outcome of this project, along with our experiences of teaching programming at elementary and high school levels, were used to create and test teaching materials that support students' understanding of programming. The material addresses not only programming-specific concepts but also phenomena relevant to the subject of technology, such as feedback systems, purposefulness, and trial and error. The teaching material, which is based on the didactic model of Organizing Purposes, consists of a PowerPoint with brief teacher comments.

Update: Uploaded new version of material with the correction of two figures that used faulty values.