Abstract
Computational thinking describes the thought process of formulating problems and their solutions in a way that can be carried out by a computer. Despite a growing effort to implement computational thinking skills in primary schools, little research has been conducted about what skills to teach at what age. This is a problem for teachers working in primary education, wanting to teach computational thinking skills. The research questions that guide this study are as follows: (1) How is age influencing the students’ success in tasks related to computational thinking? (2) How difficult are lessons about computational thinking perceived by students? (3) What are the students’ perceptions of their learning experiences? 210 primary school students between the age of 6 and 12 participated in this study. Lessons from the Barefoot Computing project are used as an introduction into two computational thinking subjects: abstraction and decomposition. The first main finding concerns the relation between age and the discussed computational thinking skills; abstraction and decomposition. Second, an interaction is found between gender and the abstraction task. Third, for both tasks, there are no significant differences between age groups on perceived difficulty, cognitive load, and flow. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.
Highlights
In the Netherlands, there is increasingly more attention for computational thinking as one of the 21st century skills (Barendsen, Grgurina, & Tolboom, 2016; Thijs, Fisser, & Van der Hoeven, 2014), when compared to earlier stages (Grgurina & Tolboom, 2008)
Experiencing more flow did not lead to more success on the abstraction task (r = .114, p = .353)
The current study provides an indication of the minimum age at which lessons about abstraction and decomposition are appropriate, and contributes to the scarce collection of empirical studies on computational thinking
Summary
In the Netherlands, there is increasingly more attention for computational thinking as one of the 21st century skills (Barendsen, Grgurina, & Tolboom, 2016; Thijs, Fisser, & Van der Hoeven, 2014), when compared to earlier stages (Grgurina & Tolboom, 2008). Computational thinking is a term first used by Papert (1980, 1996), and later by Wing (2006), and was used to describe the thought process of formulating problems and their solutions in a way that can be carried out by a computer. Research on teaching programming to older students who have no prior programming experience, has shown that the programming concepts and theories are perceived very difficult, and in result programming courses often have a lot of dropouts (Robins, A., Rountree, J. and Rountree, 2003; Stachel et al, 2013) Students from these studies have difficulties understanding the abstract concepts that are encountered in programming
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