There is growing interest to teach computer science and programming skills at schools. Here we investigate the efficacy of peer-tutoring which is known to be a useful educational resource in other domains, but never before examined in such a core aspect of applied logical thinking in children. We compared (1) how children learn computer programming from an adult vs learning from a peer, and (2) the effect of teaching a peer vs simply revising what has been learned. Our results indicate that children taught by a peer showed comparable performance to their classmates taught by an adult. However, learning from a peer promoted a more exploratory behavior, resulting in a less conservative speed-accuracy trade-off, with shorter response times, at the expense of lower accuracy. By contrast, no effects of teaching were found. Our results thus provide empirical evidence in support of peer tutoring as a way to help teaching computer programming to children. This could contribute to the promotion of a widespread understanding of how computers operate and how to shape them, essential to our values of democracy, plurality and freedom.
Peer tutoring of computer programming increases exploratory behavior in children
