Kazunari Ito (English)

Kazunari Ito, Professor of School of Social Informatics, Aoyama Gakuin University, has been developing a pictogram content creation environment, “Pictogramming” and its derivative applications. The URL of applications is https://pictogramming.org/. These applications can be a programming learning tool for beginners or an information design learning tool. It was published and received a high evaluation. Since then, he has been awarded the Yamashita Memorial Research Award for 2018, the Paper Award for 2018, Information Processing Society of Japan, and the Excellent Teaching Materials Award for 2018, Information Processing Society of Japan. Furthermore, we are developing various applications that inherit advantages of Pictogramming, such as Picthon, a pictogramming derived environment for writing programs in the Python language, JavaScpict, a pictogramming derived environment for writing programs in the JavaScript language, and BlockPictogramming, a pictogramming derived environment for writing programs using visual blocks. We call these applications as “Pictogramming Series”. The Pictogramming Series has received high praise from researchers specializing in education on informatics, and has been widely used in the context of the social focus on mandatory programming education from elementary school to high school. In addition, we have designed curricula for cross-disciplinary learning of computer science from multiple perspectives such as design, programming, content, and data processing using these applications.