Development of a Programming Course for Senior Citizens Taught by Senior Citizens

Abstract

In this study, we report the curriculum of a programming course case study of senior citizens jointly implemented by the university and a local government in Japan. The objective of the course is to offer lifelong learning opportunities for retired seniors. The program also offers them necessary skills for impacting programming education in the local elementary schools. Through a questionnaire, we design the course by collecting the opinions of the participants to understand the manner in which the participants developed human relations and learning for one year. The research objectives are to study the learnability of the programming course and the course operation among differently aged participants. Through qualitative analysis, we observed distinct characteristics of senior learners with respect to their diversities in terms of motivation, background knowledge, and skills. The second course was taught by senior lecturers who had previously attended the course and the learnability of the second course was better than the previous one. With respect to the instructional design for senior citizens, scheduling, pacing, and diverse learning styles were observed to be the key.