An Evaluation of Primary School Children Coding Using a Text-Based Language (Java)

All primary school children in England are required to write
computer programs and learn about computational thinking.
There are moves in other countries to this effect such as the
U.S. K-12 Computer Science Framework (CSF) for development. Debates on how to program and what constitutes
computational thinking are ongoing. Here we report on a
study of programing by children aged 7 – 11 using Java and
elements of computational thinking they experience. Our
platform comprises a novel Story-Writing-Coding engine we
have developed. We compare novice (children’s) processes of
coding an animated story with that of experts (college students) and evaluate the differences using four measures
based on the progressive coding of a complete program. We
also analyze the use of novice (children’s) computational
thinking in this coding process. This research is set against
a backdrop of approaches to teaching programing and
concepts of computational thinking in recent educational literature