Abstract:

Although computational thinking has become an essential competence in modern life and the need for qualified specialists in computer science continues to grow, studies show that there is still a shortage of people with suitable computer science skills (Amanullah & Bell, 2020). As the first choices about the future are made after graduating from basic school, more attention should be paid to raising the interest of lower-secondary students against the IT sector to fill the gap between reality and the actual need for IT specialists in different fields.

Even though computational thinking and learning of programming as one of the major digital literacy competencies for the twenty-first century has grown rapidly in recent years not only in high schools but also in lower education levels, there is still a lack of comprehensive overviews about different methods and approaches for teaching programming and their influence to above-mentioned interest. Therefore, this paper aimed to offer a systematic review of research about various learning paths for teaching computational thinking and programming at a lower-secondary level, focusing mainly on curriculums (countries- and school-levels) and teaching methods. More specifically, programming languages and materials used in the learning process were studied.

A systematic review was conducted in this study. Two electronic databases - the EBSCO Discovery Service and the ACM Digital Library Scientific database were used to search for the relevant papers. Altogether, 138 papers matching the search criteria were found. To analyse the data presented in the articles, the steps for the study were specified to meet the criteria of the systematic review, according to Kitchenham (2004). The most common aspects and principles for learning programming, its materials, and languages were brought out.

Our results indicated that the learning path for computational thinking and programming is not thoroughly analysed in most of the papers included in the study. There are a variety of teaching methods (gamification, embedded learning, integrated learning) and programming languages (Scratch, Python, Java) in use. However, there is a lack of quantitative surveys about the impact of the method on students’ interest.

The study results could be used in schools as a basis for creating a system for learning computational thinking and programming at a lower secondary level. On a broader level, the results could be a basis for teachers to create scenarios for teaching programming and computational thinking in lower secondary schools.

Keywords:

Computational thinking, programming, lower secondary school, teaching, learning.