Improving Computational Thinking in Secondary Students with Unplugged Tasks

Abstract

The teaching-learning of programming fundamentals is increasing in secondary schools, however, it is a very difficult task for the teacher because the student has not yet achieved full development of their computational thinking, so they have difficulty in learning programming fundamentals. In this article, we describe the development of computational thinking activities prior to the teaching of programming fundamentals and we analyze the data obtained from a pre- and post-test of computational thinking applied to a control group and an experimental group. Afterwards, we analyze the results obtained from a test of programming fundamentals to both the control group and the experimental group.The activity has been evaluated during the academic year 2017-2018 by 80 high school students from 10th grade (15 and 16 years old), our results indicate that the development of activities of Computational Thinking previous to the teaching of programming fundamentals has allowed the students to assimilate in a better way the learning in the mentioned subject, that is to say, they extended their mathematical logical reasoning to develop the respective flow charts without any difficulty. That is, they expanded their mathematical logical reasoning to develop the respective flow diagrams without any difficulty.