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CoAR-Maze: empowering children’s collaborative tangible programming in augmented reality

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Abstract

As an effective way to develop children’s computational thinking, programming education has been intensively studied by scholars. Among them, tangible programming is more in line with children’s cognitive development and inherently supports collaborative learning. However, most of the tangible programming systems fall short in effectively stimulating active collaboration among children effectively. In this paper, we present CoAR-Maze, an augmented reality (AR) based tangible programming system that incorporates a collaborative mechanism designed for children’s programming. The system assists children in learning programming concepts such as sequences, loops, conditional statements, and task decomposition, while emphasizing the stimulation of active collaboration and enhancing immersion in children's programming learning. User studies validate the effectiveness, usability, and support for collaboration among child users provided by the system.

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Funding

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61872363 and 61672507, the Natural Science Foundation of Beijing & Key project of Science and Technology Plan of Beijing Municipal Education Commission under Grant No. 21JD0044, the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Grant No. XDA27000000.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Mingyu Zhang, Jiaxiang Li, Yiyan Lin & Danli Wang

  2. School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Mingyu Zhang, Jiaxiang Li & Danli Wang

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA

    Qiao Jin

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  1. Mingyu Zhang
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  2. Jiaxiang Li
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  3. Yiyan Lin
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Correspondence to Danli Wang.

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Zhang, M., Li, J., Lin, Y. et al. CoAR-Maze: empowering children’s collaborative tangible programming in augmented reality. CCF Trans. Pervasive Comp. Interact. 5, 396–410 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42486-023-00135-8

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