Comparative Analysis of Hardware Content in Elementary School Textbooks in Japan

The revision of the Courses of Study by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has made programming education compulsory in elementary school education from 2020. This is part of the 'programming education for the development of information utilization skills' introduced by the MEXT. Programming education in elementary schools involves programming activities using learning materials with hardware such as Arduino and MESH in classroom practice. Through these activities, it is expected to have the effect of developing a sense of making use of the workings of computers to create a better life and society. It is Conceivable that programming learning using learning materials involving hardware can also yield learning effects from the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) education perspective. While such development of programming education is expected, there have been previous studies on descriptions of programming in textbook analyses, but to the authors' knowledge, there are no textbook analyses on hardware. In this paper, we analyzed the number of pages and contents of programming education, especially those related to hardware using electronic devices, in elementary school textbooks approved by MEXT, with a focus on how programming education is treated in these textbooks, including characteristics of subjects and grades and trends of publishers. The purpose of this study is to understand the actual situation of textbooks for hardware education, which plays a part in programming education and is expected to develop in the future. The hardware was positioned as hardware learning materials listed by MEXT, which include microcontrollers and input/output ports such as Artec Corporation's Studuino, and programming learning materials that combine blocks, robot parts, programming software, etc. Textbooks are all textbooks published as of September 2023 by 16 companies, totaling 305 books of 13 different textbooks. In order to determine whether hardware is described in the textbooks in the form of text or photographs, we counted each page in which hardware was described as one page, even if there were multiple descriptions on a single page. As a result, many of the descriptions were found in the “Use of Electricity” unit in grades 5 and 6 of science.