Analysis of programming environments for developing computational thinking skills and teaching programming to novices

Laura-Ochoa L.; Bedregal-Alpaca N. · RISTI - Revista Iberica de Sistemas e Tecnologias de Informacao (2021)

Resumen

The aim of this work is to analyze different programming environments for beginning students that facilitate the development of computational thinking skills, program creation and transition to a text-based programming language. A quasi-experimental methodological design was used, since it did not work with a control group. A mixed exploratory investigation was carried out. The study group consisted of 34 first-year students from the Professional School of Education of the National University of San Agustin de Arequipa. The results show that teaching with block-based programming environments facilitates the understanding of programming concepts. Code.org and turtle with Python were the most preferred tools for learning programming, making them suitable for transitioning to a textual programming language. The programming environments used allowed the development of skills related to computational thinking.

Instituciones: Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa