This paper presents the experience of an educational activity in the form of a
competition-based game, aiming at introducing the students to issues of computer
programming. It also provides preliminary research evidence that approaching
learning as an entertaining activity, through the use of LM robots and the spirit of
team competition, offers a pleasant, creative and efficient method of instruction for
the acquisition of introductory programming knowledge.
The enrichment of the lessons by introducing new material in order to evaluate in
more detail the level of the knowledge obtained by the students with the use of this
specific educational tool-artifact is within our future aims. Another issue for
consideration is determining the most appropriate duration of the training sessions
since it was shown to be an important factor during the activities the results of which
are presented in this paper.
Another interesting subject that we are planning to deal with is the use of the new
Lego brick known as NXT (Next). The Lego's new creation has been considerably
improved as far as communication devices and autonomy abilities are concerned
comparing to its predecessor RCX. Moreover, NXT is accompanied by a great variety
of sensors the use of which makes possible the creation of a larger amount of more
complex activities. Finally, the recently created program development environments
for the NXT brick facilitates the easier use of robots and also the understanding of
more complex programming concepts such as the subroutines