Designing Programming Education Course for Senior Citizens: Lifelong Learning in the Age of the 100-Year Life

In this study, we report the curriculum of a programming course case study of senior citizens jointly implemented by the university and a local government in Japan. The objective of the course is to offer high-quality lifelong learning opportunities for retired seniors. The program also offers them necessary skills for impacting programming education in the local elementary schools, and the participatory action research (PAR) was adopted as a research method. Through a questionnaire and participant observation, we design the course by collecting the opinions of a lecturer or assistant to understand the manner in which the participants developed human relations and learning for one year. The research objectives are to study the learnability of the programming course and the course operation among differently aged participants. Through qualitative analysis, we observed distinct characteristics of senior learners with respect to their diversities in terms of motivation, background knowledge, and skills. The second course was taught by senior lecturers who had previously attended the course and the learnability of the second course was better than the previous one. With respect to the instructional design for senior citizens, scheduling, pacing, and diverse learning styles were observed to be the key. For future study, we attempt to address the conflicts among members and guarantee the quality of education for senior lecturers to support the teaching of programming in elementary schools. This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP18K02828.