Comparing three different approaches to teach programming and computational thinking in 5th grade
Résumé
Programming and computational thinking are gradually being integrated into school curricula. Many researchers believe that this learning would have a positive impact on certain abilities essential to any citizen in the decades to come, particularly in relation to problem solving abilities. However, there are many ways, both plugged-in and unplugged, to teach programming in school and very few studies attempted to compare these different approaches. For this reason, we conducted an experiment with 319 Grade 5 students in France. They were assigned to three experimental conditions: learning with educational programming software (Scratch-only group), learning with software and an educational robot (Scratch + Thymio group) and unplugged learning (Unplugged group). Our aim was to examine whether significant differences can be observed between the three groups regarding knowledge and understanding of fundamental concepts in programming, ability to solve algorithmic problems, motivation, self-belief and attitude toward science. Our main results show that the Scratch-only group exhibited better learning performance compared to the other groups, with the lowest performance for the unplugged group. Explanations could be sought by looking at the influence of the feedback allowed by the programming software and by evaluating the cognitive load associated with the different learning situations. A plugged-in approach also seems to benefit to students’ motivation, compared to the unplugged group which showed a significant drop in motivation at the end of the sessions, but this positive impact is only observable with boys.
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