“Programming education,” which aims to nurture pupils’ logical thinking skills through e.g. computer programming, will be compulsory from 2020 in elementary schools in Japan. However, many schools and teachers are not fully ready. In this article authors developed and ran a short computer programming course for elementary school teachers and studied how attendees changed their awareness of programming education. The result showed that the course improved their understanding of the programming education and its teaching method and confidence in teaching programming to some extent. However, their confidence in teaching programming was relatively lower than other elements. Attendees with programming experience showed higher self-esteem, which implied that adding one’s programming experience would increase one’s skills. Practical-minded understanding of programming was more contributive to increase confidence in teaching programming than conceptual understanding of programming.
