Teaching Interaction using State Diagrams | Christopher Schankula | Making my little corner of the world a better place, one student at a time. ABSTRACT To make computational thinking appealing to young learners, initial programming instruction looks very different now than a decade ago, with increasing use of graphics and robots both real and virtual. After learning the basics of drawing using code, children want to create interactive programs, and they need a model for this and large amounts of syntax can get in their way. State diagrams provide such a model, but in the Functional Programming community, there is a lot of skepticism about explicitly talking about state, perhaps because they associate it with side-effects. This presentation details using a state diagram tool to help students create interactive programs. We detail statistics from a small pilot using the tool to answer research questions about whether grade 4/5 students understand the use of state diagrams and how they correspond to the programs they generate. Authors: Padma Pasupathi, Christopher Schankula, Nicole DiVincenzo, Sarah Coker and Christopher Anand - McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada • Follow us on social: Twitter: https://twitter.com/LambdaDays LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lambda-days/ • Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next Code Sync conference near you! See what’s coming up at: https://codesync.global • SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC47eUBNO8KBH_V8AfowOWOw