Sandwich Robot for Computational Thinking: Reflections From Testing With High School Pupils

This study examines "Sandwich Robot," a casual, Blockly-based puzzle game designed to build algorithmic thinking among beginner programmers, and reports on a second testing iteration with 45 pupils across three classes at a Danish technical high school, roughly second and third year students. The game is grounded in hermeneutics and a taxonomy of computational thinking skills, and the authors frame the work as a mixed-methods inquiry into how learners engage with the game and reflect on its educational value. The study's scope is deliberately small and local, situated within one school context in Denmark and focused on a single intervention.

Data were gathered through several complementary channels: ethnographic drawings and field notes, automatically logged gameplay metrics such as attempts, click density, and solution length, and co-design sketches analyzed in NVivo. Pupils generally found the game engaging and challenging, with many replaying levels to earn three-star scores. Their co-design feedback concentrated on usability, particularly movement controls and button design, and requested a larger coding area and new features such as timed sessions and multiplayer modes.

A notable finding concerns the deliberately limited coding area. Although the constraint was intended to encourage abstraction, pupils tended to produce long instruction sequences and sometimes over-compressed code containing inefficient moves. The authors treat this behavior as a productive starting point for classroom discussion about the values embedded in designing digital artifacts. They are careful to acknowledge the small sample and explicitly decline to claim statistical significance, positioning the results as reflective and exploratory rather than generalizable.