A Comparative Study on the Effects of Hands-on Robot and EPL Programming Activities on Creative Problem-Solving Ability in Children

With the accelerating transition to a super-intelligent and hyper-connected society, educational media are being diversified and new software education is emerging. In the field of education, software education has gained more importance to enhance children's creativity; therefore, robot education, which uses robots in education, has been introduced. The purpose of the present study was to compare the effects of hands-on experiential robot activities and Educational Programming Language (EPL) activities applied to early childhood education. In these activities, children assembled and operated robots by themselves, and the effects of the two activities on the children's problem-solving skills were evaluated. A total of 45 five-year-old children attending kindergartens in the city of D participated in the study. In the experimental group, 22 children performed hands-on robot activities, while in the comparison group, 23 children performed EPL-based robot programming activities. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was carried out using the pretest score as the covariate and the posttest score as the dependent variable to determine if there was any difference in creative problem-solving skills between the two groups. The results showed that the pretest score, which was covariance, had a significant effect on the posttest score. Furthermore, the difference in the posttest score between the experimental and comparison groups, after removing the effect of the pretest score, was statistically significant (F = 12.491, p < .01). In the time of the global emergence of software education, the results of this study suggest that further discussion of appropriate early childhood software education is needed. The present study suggests the direction of software education from the perspective of early childhood education.