Research on the Development of Programming Support Systems Focused on the Cooperation Between Activity Diagrams and Scratch

According to the 2017 Elementary School Curriculum Guidelines (2017, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology), programming learning is carried out in a comprehensive study time. It is conceived using an activity diagram and programmed in Scratch. However, it is difficult for elementary school students who have no programming experience, and they can only handle simple contents. We thought that the cause of the high difficulty was in the process of debugging. By developing a function to draw an activity diagram corresponding to a Scratch block, it will be possible to directly compare it with the activity diagram at the conceptual stage. We thought that this would make it easier to determine whether the error was in the program or in the concept stage. By doing this, it is possible to reduce the difficulty level during debugging, and it is thought that even elementary school students will be able to challenge difficult tasks.