A Preliminary Usability Study of a Novel Educational Training System to Teach ScratchJr. in School

Teaching programming to children at an early age has been proven to be beneficial. Some research has focused on how to teach programming to children with special needs. According to Human–Computer Interaction, all users should be involved in the design of their systems (including learning systems). However, evaluation procedures with young children are a complex task, which can be even harder when the young children have some special needs. This paper presents a preliminary usability study of a novel educational training system to teach ScratchJr. to young children. 48 neurotypical students between 6 and 7 years and 2 students with special needs in a pilot study were asked to use the system to find out whether they could complete an input/output activity and how it is related to their preferences.