A Practical Study Focusing on the Affective Domain as an Incipient Stage of Computational Thinking for Fourth-Grade Elementary School Students

Abstract

We developed and implemented an instructional method and teaching materials aimed at sprouting a programming mindset for 4th grade students who have not yet been exposed to programming education. The teaching material developed was a model of an automatic door. One of these models was distributed to each student, and the students were asked to think of a program to operate the automatic door through free trials. In a survey of children’s awareness before and after the educational practice, the mean values of all items tended to be higher in the survey. The effect size of the interest value was small to medium, and the effect size of the use value and thought intention was medium to large. These results indicate that the instructional methods and teaching materials developed in this study are effective for the sprouting of computational thinking.