The effects of visual programming on elementary school students' computational thinking

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Computational thinking (CT) has been identified as a key skill that people need in the rapidly developing information age. The research community proposed that exposing CT to young children would be beneficial for the development in their abstract thinking, critical thinking and problem solving skills. A variety of visual programming environments were designed and developed in recent years to fulfill this purpose. The current study implemented an Hour of Code visual programming activity, "Make a Flappy Game" on six classes of elementary school students, aiming to further our understanding of the effects of visual programming activities on elementary students' computational thinking by describing what students learn to do. Based on Brennan and Resnick's framework, the current study measured computational thinking in three dimensions: 1) students' understanding in key computational concepts; 2) students' usage of key aspects of computational practice; and 3) the key aspects of computational perspectives students demonstrated during the visual programming activities. A total of 119 elementary school students participated in the study. During the study, the students first filled in a pre-test questionnaire, and then performed the "Make a Flappy Game" visual programming activity, and then filled in a post-test questionnaire. The results show that overall students achieved significant improvement in their understanding in computational concepts. However, the results also indicated that the significant gains were due to a relatively small number of students who made substantial improvement. A considerable number of students still having difficulties understanding the concept of conditions and how the coding blocks actually work behind the visual representation. The results demonstrated students' implemented key aspects of computational practice: experimenting and iterating, testing and debugging. And the results also demonstrated students' computational perspectives in expressing, connecting and questioning. The study shed lights on the design of visual programming activities and the potential implementation of visual programming activities into elementary school classrooms