ENHANCING OF INFORMATICS TRAINING FOR CHILDREN IN PROGRAMMING CONTESTS USING SCRATCH PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

The launch of Nigerian Olympiad in Informatics (NOI) some years ago, there is need for more children to partake in the contest which has been a continual problem. Students and many teachers in the field of computer science see programming as a difficult aspect to teach and educate children. International Olympiad in Informatics tasks and contests are mostly considered too abstract at the primary and secondary school level. There is a lot of obstacles which can be improved through the use of Scratch, a visual graphical programming language developed at the MIT Media Laboratory. Scratch enables kids to develop interests with programming primarily on the concepts and theories in programming, it offers the environment to design several projects that are interesting and meaningful to the kids. Scratch allows accessing children’s skills in programming with Nigeria Olympiad in Informatics related tasks and provides them the avenue to appreciate and improve in the learning of programming languages used in NOI and IOI like C++, Java and python. It promotes the usage of new technologies to provide children with better learning opportunities.

Keywords: Visual programming, Scratch contests, Nigeria Olympiad in informatics.