The purpose of this paper is to introduce Japanese informatics education from elementary school through high school. To this end, we discussed what competencies are expected to be developed by programming education, the Japanese curriculum standard for informatics subjects, and what should be considered in future programming education. To concretize the discussion, we examined previous research about problem-solving skills, especially in Computational Thinking, the characteristics of the high school informatics I text, and standardized tests of informatics which are deeply related to the Japanese curriculum standard.

MONSAKUN is a software of learning by problem-posing for arithmetic unit word problems. We propose a learning log analysis and visualization method to support reflection activities on the practical use of MONSAKUN. First, we construct a method to convert learning logs into a multidimensional vector and use a clustering algorithm and a visualization method. Then, we apply the proposed method to a large set of log data obtained through practical use in all grades of the same public elementary school. As the analysis results with the proposed method, we concluded the proposed method useful because the proposed method could find some learning tasks that would be inappropriate for the students.

In 2020, almost all universities students enrolled in on-campus programs started implementing remote learning due to the influence of COVID-19. Data were collected from 514 university students enrolled in on-campus programs (352 students in the Kanto area and 162 students in the Kansai area). Various aspects of their remote learning experiences were examined, including their understanding through remote learning; difficulty in maintaining self-motivation when learning on one’s own. The results revealed a positive relationship between learning motivation and understanding, which implies that there is a need to examine the motivation level when providing and implementing remote learning lessons for students enrolled in on-campus programs.