  Recently, introducing computer science and educational robots in compulsory
education has received increasing attention. However, the use of screens in
classrooms is often met with resistance, especially in primary school. To
address this issue, this study presents the development of a handwriting-based
programming language for educational robots. Aiming to align better with
existing classroom practices, it allows students to program a robot by drawing
symbols with ordinary pens and paper. Regular smartphones are leveraged to
process the hand-drawn instructions using computer vision and machine learning
algorithms, and send the commands to the robot for execution. To align with the
local computer science curriculum, an appropriate playground and scaffolded
learning tasks were designed. The system was evaluated in a preliminary test
with eight teachers, developers and educational researchers. While the
participants pointed out that some technical aspects could be improved, they
also acknowledged the potential of the approach to make computer science
education in primary school more accessible.
