Small robots dart across a white course, wobbling as they try to follow a thick black line taped to the table.
Around them, middle school students huddle over laptops, tweaking lines of Python code before eagerly sending new instructions to their robots. A small adjustment here. A different motor speed there. Success isn’t measured by a perfect grade but by whether the little machines make it to the finish line.
For Ryan Woo, that’s exactly how programming should be taught.
Woo is a computer science doctoral student in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. While his research focuses on human-computer interaction, data visualization and educational technology, this spring he helped transform those interests into something tangible by designing the programming module for Desert CodeSprouts, ASU’s annual technology workshop for middle school students.
Rather than introducing coding through traditional exercises on a screen, Woo and the team challenged students to program robots to navigate a course using sensors and simple code. The lesson introduced students to foundational programming concepts while also demonstrating how software interacts with the physical world.
“Our goal was to blend programming and robotics into a single interactive lesson,” Woo says.
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