Teaching Computational Thinking to Primary School Students via Unplugged Programming Lessons

Abstract

This paper focuses on an introductory course in computational thinking for students at their final year in primary school, carried out at the start of the academic year 2015/2016. The course consisted of six 90 minutes’ lessons that were taught once a week over the course of six weeks in 26 schools in the north of the Netherlands. The lessons were designed for students to study programming concepts without requiring computers or tablets. This paper describes the design and evaluation process for these ‘unplugged’ lessons in computational thinking. This paper ends with design principles for the design of lessons in computational thinking, and discusses possible directions for future research.

Keywords

• computational thinking
• programming
• unplugged
• k-12
• primary