Digital educational environment PiktoMir: Experience of development and mass implementation of an annual programming course for preschoolers

The article presents the result of work on the creation and implementation of the annual course “Algorithmics for Preschool Children”, which, under the guidance of Academician V. B. Betelin for six years led the Department of Educational Informatics of the SRISA RAS together with the Department of Education of the Administration of the city of Surgut (Western Siberia). Since September 2018, the course has been held in all preparatory groups of all kindergartens in Surgut — more than 6,000 children annually. The educational and methodological kit for the course, including the digital educational environment PiktoMir, is freely distributed and can be downloaded from the SRISA RAS website for use for any purpose, including commercial. The course “Algorithmics for preschoolers” discussed in the article is the first part of the long-term course “The basics of programming for preschoolers and junior schoolchildren” being developed. The course uses a textless programming technique. The child composes a program from pictograms with robot commands, singleletter names of subroutines and pictograms of control structures. At the initial stage of training, a screenless technology for compiling a program from material objects is used. The proposed technology favorably differs from analogues in the world in that when working with PiktoMir, a program in the material world can be composed of material objects freely movable by a child: cards, cubes with printed or hand-drawn command pictograms. Information about each command of the program is extracted exclusively from the image perceived by the child, and not from any machine-readable graphic codes or electrical codes hardwired into the material carrier of the pictogram. The child “photographs” pictograms with his tablet, on which they are recognized using neural networks by a special PiktoMir module.