A Comparative Study on Programming Education——Based on China and America

Abstract

In the past decade, the academia of education and computer science has regarded programming as a core competence of K-12 students. China's K-12 programming education market was launched in 2013. By 2017, the entire K-12 programming education market ushered in a period of the explosion, many of China's original K-12 programming education platforms emerged. Still, its development speed lags behind many countries led by the United States. The lack of literature on comparing K-12 programming education between China and the United States can be distinguished as a research gap in this field. It is necessary to conduct a comparative study because it can help promote a thorough understanding of their development status. The research paper mainly adopts composite methods of quantitative bibliometrics and qualitative interview to fill in this gap together with market research. The results of bibliometrics show the two developing paradigms of programming education, the research focus on computational thinking, and the trend topics of K-12 programming education among academia. Based on our Chinese market research, the teaching mode of K-12 programming education are online, offline, and blended learning. When it comes to course contents and their corresponding orientation, the elementary courses are formative education, the middle-level lessons are algorithm-oriented, and the hardest are the creative ones designed for computer competitions. Besides, most programming education curriculum starts from visual lessons and adds game elements. Through interviews with relevant professionals and teachers in China and the United States, we learned their views on programming platforms, evaluation criteria, computational thinking, and the development trend of K-12 programming education.