Activation de schèmes de programmation et mémorisation de figures géométriques

Learning programming concepts in school raises various theoretical and pragmatical questions. The experience, accumulated these past years in this field, enables us to measure the scope of the difficulties encountered both by the pupils in mastering the basic programming concepts and by teachers in building pertinent learning situations. The experiment, reported in this paper, focuses on the comparison of the effects of «programming schemes» activation versus «drawing schemes» activation on the memorization of geometrical figure characteristics. The children of the «programming group» are asked to manipulate «computer programming objects» in order to describe a figure. They build up a schematic internal representation in which the pertinent information is presented without any reference to the metrical characteristics of the object. Conversely, the representation, elaborated by children who use «familiar schemes» (drawing), is closer to the figure characteristics of the image but it induces them to make more «false recognition» of the object when one asks them to find the target among other figures.