A Comparison of Preschool and Elementary School Children Learning Computer Science Concepts through a Multilanguage Robot Programming Platform

CECILIA MARTINEZ; MARCOS GÓMEZ; LUCIANA BENOTTI

Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, ITiCSE 2015

Association for Computing Machinery

Año: 2015; p. 159 - 164

This paper describes a school intervention to teach fundamental Computer Science (CS) concepts to 3-11 year old students with a multilanguage robot programming platform (using drag and drop, Python and C++ languages) in Argentina. We analyze students´ performance and learning process based on multiple choice test and classroom observations. Data show that all students can intuitively learn sequence, conditional, loops and parameters and that girls performed slightly better than boys. Older students can easily combine these concepts to write a program. The multilanguage platform promotes student spontaneous exploration of more sophisticated CS concepts and languages. These findings imply that introducing CS in mandatory schooling from an inquiry based approach is both achievable and beneficial.