Manipulatives for Teaching Computer Science Concepts

Despite many initiatives to increase participation in K-12 computer science (CS), only about half of the public high schools offer CS, and only about a third of the K-8 public schools offer CS. To make matters worse, even if schools offer CS, interests wane from late elementary through post-secondary education. The lack of participation has been attributed to feelings of not belonging, technology-rich programs creating divides among students, and negative belief systems that CS is socially isolating, lacks creativity or fun, and is for intelligent, white males, and we believe one contributing factor is the way CS is introduced, taught, and scaffolded. In this full paper, we present innovative pedagogical approaches to teach fundamental CS concepts, such as abstraction, representation, algorithms, and computation, to 6th grade students using manipulatives, which are physical objects that students interact with to teach or reinforce a concept. Teaching and learning using manipulatives has a long history in science and mathematics education, but the development of and research on manipulatives to teach CS concepts is less common. Through observational field notes from a 6th-grade classroom and interviews with the teacher, we discuss the affordances and drawbacks of the different approaches and manipulatives. We found that using manipulatives led to increased student engagement and participation with the material and made teaching the material more exciting and engaging for the teacher. In addition, we found that the manipulatives provided a way for student misunderstandings and errors to be more apparent through tinkering with the physical objects, and the teacher was able to easily understand how to extend the activities and find ways to connect multiple CS concepts. However, we observed several drawbacks with different manipulatives and approaches for using the manipulatives that could be helpful for future changes and the development of new manipulatives. For example, the puzzle-like games we gave students to construct algorithms for tossing a coin to see who goes first in a game and playing Rock, Paper, Scissors were challenging for students to recreate a given algorithm that was not necessarily an algorithm they would have designed themselves.