Acceptance and appropriation of the AelE environment by teachers in training

Abstract

It’s been ten years since Resolution 263/15 of the Federal Education Council established in Argentina that “the teaching and learning of programming is of strategic importance in the National Education System during compulsory schooling, to strengthen the nation’s socio-economic development”. It’s also been seven years since the approval of the Priority Learning Cores for Digital Education, Programming, and Robotics.
Since then, technology has taken on an even more prominent role in society, boosted primarily by the pandemic and the emergence of generative artificial intelligence systems. Still, we are far from achieving the stated goal. One of the main problems is the lack of qualified teaching staff.
We have made significant progress in the generation of teaching materials and the development of educational environments. A notable example is AelE, a blockbased programming environment for Arduino that stands out in multiple aspects, especially regarding its robustness and versatility. Many other Arduino prog amming environments simply use blocks as literal translations into the underlying Arduino language, disregarding the multitude of problems that can arise from invalid block combinations. AelE not only detects and prevents such problems, but also assists the programmer in solving them and learning while doing so.
AelE was tested on several occasions, used to teach programming to populations of different ages and sociocultural backgrounds. It was included as part of courses and workshops for high school students, teacher training programs, and in prison settings. In most cases, it was combined with other, simpler languages and environments, such as PilasBloques or Scratch, to teach the fundamentals of programming, and experience with Arduino was always left for a more advanced stage of the course due to the additional complications it can entail. In 2023, a programming course was held for high school students using AelE as the only programming environment, showing its potential for teaching the basics of progra ming and not just for use at an advanced stage, after having learned the fundamentals with other environments.
In this paper, we present the results of an experience in which a course similar to the 2023 one was taught, using only AelE, but this time for teachers in training. At the end of the course, acceptance of the environment was assessed using a survey based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Participants were subsequently contacted to inquire about the impact of both the training and their long-term use of the environment.