Academic Paper
Rina Yano, Hiroki Tanioka, Kenji Matsuura, Masahiko Sano, Tetsushi Ueta, Quantitative Measurement and Analysis to Computational Thinking for Elementary Schools in Japan, Information Engineering Express, IIAI International Journal Series, pp.2-24, 0 .
Abstract: In Japan, programming education has been made compulsory in elementary schools since 2020.The Programming Education Guide (GPE) explains the purpose of programming education andthe abilities that can be fostered through programming education. In addition, the Portal Site forProgramming Education Focusing on Elementary Schools introduces various examples of programming education. However, there is little information measuring whether programming classes are effective in improving OTWP (Objective Thinking as a Way of Programming) abilitiesbased on CT (Computational Thinking), except for reports of improvement after simple statisticalanalysis. Therefore, we prepared 30 CT questions, 12 basic and 18 applied, for the CT test considering four key techniques, decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithms, ofwhich 14 questions were pre-test and seven questions were assessment test. In the experiment,18 elementary school students from grades 1st to 6th were given a short workshop only once,and the analysis of the effect was done statistically, considering their habituation to the problems.The results of the experiment showed that there was no effect of the one-time workshop, unlikeother reports of improvement that used simple statistical methods. It became clear that the CTability was not improved by the short education. On the other hand, a new finding isthat femalesmay be inferior to males in three techniques: decomposition, algorithm, and abstraction.