Enhancing computational thinking skills in early childhood education: Learning experience through tangible and graphical interfaces

The development and integration of digital technology, in the current social context, makes it necessary to design and implement educational proposals that contribute to strengthening the teaching-learning processes through resources and didactic materials that provide dynamism, flexibility and innovation. One of the approaches that is gaining popularity in the international scenario is to approach the teaching of technology, programming and other digital skills such as computational thinking from an early age. This paper presents some of the results achieved through the development of a formative experience to foster the learning of computational thinking in early childhood education. The study corresponds to a quasi-experimental design with pretest-postest measures, without control group. The sample of participants was 44 students and 2 teachers, from a concerted school, in Salamanca, Spain, during the period 2017-2018. The activities consisted of solving problems with programming challenges using a tangible and a graphical interface. The data were collected through a rubric, questionnaires and field diary. The general results show the existence of differences between pretest and postest, which indicates that an advance was generated in reference to the learning of computational thinking through the explored characteristic. In addition, there is a positive acceptance of the activities between students and teachers. The study represents an initial assessment of the development of programming and computational thinking skills in young children using tangible and graphical learning interfaces.