From Pirate Islands to Routing Tables: Investigating Intermediate Representations in Concreteness Fading through AR Learning

With the recent growth in interest in computing education for younger children, concrete representations have enabled children to understand concepts that, in abstract form, may otherwise be considered too advanced. Introducing children to computing concepts through concrete representations may be necessary at younger ages, but there is also a need for effective methods for progressing from this towards abstract understanding. Concreteness Fading has previously been applied in computing contexts with some success, but questions remain about how to design learning environments that most effectively support this progression, including the role of intermediate representations. This paper presents an augmented reality (AR) environment that uses the Concreteness Fading approach to teach introductory topics in computer networks. An in-school experiment with 59 children aged 9-10 investigated the effect of three distinct methods of fading representations from concrete to abstract, using a between-groups pre-test / post-test design. Three groups were compared: concrete > concrete > abstract (“two-step”), concrete > intermediate > abstract (“three-step”), and concrete > concrete/intermediate > intermediate > intermediate/abstract > abstract (“five-step”). The results showed a statistically significant difference between the two- and three-step groups in favour of the three-step, confirming the value of explicitly linking mutual referents via an intermediate representation when moving from concrete to abstract. No statistically significant difference was found between the three- and five-step groups, suggesting that increasing the number of intermediate representations does not significantly improve the learning outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of educational technology for children.