The correlation between participating extramural programming courses and children's intelligence development

: Recently, artificial intelligence has been developed at an surprising speed and used in different aspects in our society. In fact, robot programming courses have become a hot topic being discussed in the education sector. Since 2014, computer education reform in primary and secondary schools worldwide has advanced programming courses to the first grade of primary school or even pre-school stage[1]. Therefore, an increasing number of parents enroll their children to robot programming training courses. The father of children’s programming education Mitchel Resnick [2] believe programming is a kind of education that allows children to creatively address practical problems by thinking in a way that how programs run and this goal has become the recruitment and promotion slogans used by various programming training institution. However, whether extramural programming courses can actually achieve the goal claimed or they are just a so-called ‘ stupid tax’ paid by parents remains to be a widely discussed and controversial topic. Based on Wechsler Intelligence scale of children fourth edition measurement scale [3], our research conducts an intelligence test for 50 children, with an average age of 10 and who are attending programming courses, to find out whether participating extramural programming courses can indeed enhance children’s problem-solving skills and calculation capacity.