Computational thinking through unplugged activities in early years of Primary Education

The inclusion of computational thinking (CT) in the classroom is something that the present and future society is demanding. However, this domain remains largely unexplored, especially in the first years of Primary Education. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the inclusion of the so-called unplugged activities favours the development of CT in the students of the early years of Primary Education. To this end, a quasi-experimental study has been carried out to explore the eventual benefit of a mixed approach that combines both unplugged and plugged-in activities. In particular, 84 second-grade students took part in the experiment. Three questions were evaluated: the development of their CT skills, their motivation towards the proposed instruction, and the influence of students' gender in the two previous areas. The intervention was designed on a selection of activities extracted from Code.org courses, and was divided into two phases, one in which one group worked with unplugged activities and the other with plugged-in activities, and a second where both groups worked with plugged-in activities. Analysing the three proposed questions through tests performed before, in between and after the instruction, it is concluded that the inclusion of unplugged activities in the instruction seems beneficial taking into account CT, motivation and gender.