Collaboration of Unplugged and Plugged Activities for Primary School Students: Developing Computational Thinking Skills with Programming

Abstract

The study was carried out with 18 primary school students (11 girls, 7 boys) who participated in programming training conducted at a university. In this research, the implementation of programming activities in the whole classroom is a case study. While trying to understand the phenomena during the implementation of the activities in the study, a quasi-experimental design was carried out without a control group in order to determine the changes before and after learning and to investigate the research questions. In this quasi-experimental design, measurements were made both before the implementation (pre-test) and after the implementation (post-test). The results showed that the combination of plugged and unplugged programming activities help improve primary school students' computational thinking skills. At the end of the study, it was concluded that unplugged and plugged activities would be beneficial for primary school students when used together. Further research is needed to evaluate these activities separately, their role in providing the gains, and the students' thoughts about these activities. In addition, the effects of using different teaching methods in programming education can be examined.