The effect of coding courses on the cognitive abilities and problem-solving skills of preschool children

Background and Context: There are studies which indicate that computer programming supports high-level abilities for everyone such as creative thinking, questioning, problem solving and critical thinking which are considered within the scope of 21st-century abilities. Objective: The current experimental study was carried out to put forth the impact on the problem solving and cognitive abilities of computer programming course applied on 4-5-year-old preschool children. Method: The study was arranged according to a pretest-posttest control group experiment model. Findings: According to the results, there is an increase in the non-verbal cognitive abilities of children in the experiment group with no statistically significant difference in their problem-solving skills. Implications: Our findings give an evidence about the effects of a coding course on preschool children through the use of two validated tests for problem-solving skills and cognitive skills.