Developing children's computational thinking: Algorithmic thinking and debugging

Abstract

In recent years, educators and researchers have increasingly argued the importance of supporting every children’s computational thinking development at early stage. A six-hour programming curriculum for fifth grade were developed as our second-year longitudinal research, aiming to develop primary school children’s’ computational thinking. This paper reports the effect of computational thinking education on the 5th grade students (n=419). The findings show that students have achieved learning gains in algorithmic thinking and debugging skills. It was also found that while male students outperformed female students before the intervention, female students benefited from the curriculum and achieved the computational thinking skills similar to male students.