Reprinted from the PEG page, a programming education project promoted by CANVAS.

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Today marks an open class and research presentation event at Shinagawa City Kyoyo Elementary School, a PEG partner school.
As part of this year’s in-school research initiative, teachers who have been working to incorporate programming into their subject areas will present their findings. The event will
also feature a discussion between teachers in charge of supervision, Kazuhiro Abe and Hisashi Imamura (former professor at Shumei University).

First-graders are assembling Raspberry Pi computers in preparation for an open class. Each one booted up successfully in less than five minutes.
Today’s lesson theme is “Let’s Make a Saltwater Aquatic Plant”! I can’t wait to see what they come up with!

Of the 14 open classes, programming has been incorporated into three of them: art, language arts, and math. In the
language arts class, students are learning about the relationship between the subject and predicate through a programming language. They are creating scenarios to make
characters move as they intend and expressing those scenarios using a programming language.
The scenarios are designed to be divided into two parts—“what” and “did”—to help students learn the functions of the subject and predicate.

In second-grade math class, students are learning about the “place value” of numbers up to 1,000 through programming.
This unit helps them understand the composition of numbers and their relative sizes—for example, 2,000 consists of two bundles of 1,000, and 3,700 consists of three bundles of 1,000 and seven bundles of 100.Based on given three-digit numbers, the students used Scratch to arrange blocks for 1,000, 100, 10, and 1 to complete the numbers. They arranged the blocks while thinking about how to use fewer blocks and make the arrangement simpler.
Today’s activity was conducted in pairs. By working on the task together and discussing their approach, students were able to engage more consciously with the process—reflecting on what they were thinking as they arranged the blocks.