Basic concepts of programming expounded for preschoolers

The development of information technology has formed a socioeconomic demand for reducing the age of acquaintance of children with programming. As a result of 6 years of efforts, the authors managed to develop and massively introduce an annual programming course for preschoolers built on the metaphor of program control. In the process of developing the course, the authors were able to select and formulate a set of basic programming concepts which fully reveals this metaphor and, at the same time, can be mastered by preschool children age 6+ in an active-play form. This set of concepts is introduced using examples of control programs for moving and stationary objects with an intuitive, visible command system. At the beginning of the course, control without feedback is introduced, the concept of feedback is introduced and used only at the end of the course. As a basic pedagogical software product, the PictoMir text-free pictographic system developed by the Federal Research Center “Scientific Research Institute for System Analysis of the Russian Academy of Sciences” and its programmatic and methodological content is used, allowing each preschooler to gain experience in writing and debugging at least 120–150 simplest programs by the end of the course.