A Systematic Review of Computational Thinking in Early Ages
It addresses the gap in computational thinking education for young children, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing literature without introducing new methods.
This paper conducted a systematic review of over 60 papers from 2010 to 2020 to identify teaching initiatives and tools, such as ScratchJr and KIBO, for developing computational thinking in early childhood, specifically targeting kindergarten, and selected 31 papers for analysis.
Nowadays, technology has become dominant in the daily lives of most people around the world. From children to older people, technology is present, helping in the most diverse daily tasks and allowing accessibility. However, many times these people are just end-users, without any incentive to the development of computational thinking (CT). With advances in technologies, the abstraction of coding, programming languages, and the hardware resources involved will become a reality. However, while we have not progressed to this stage, it is necessary to encourage the development of CT teaching from an early age. This work will present state of the art concerning teaching initiatives and tools on programming (e.g., ScratchJr), robotics (e.g., KIBO), and other playful tools (e.g., Happy Maps) for the development of CT in the early ages, specifically filling the gap of CT at the kindergarten level. This survey presents a systematic review of the literature, emphasizing computational and robotic tools used in preschool classes to develop the CT. The systematic review evaluated more than 60 papers from 2010 to December 2020, electing 31 papers and adding three papers from the qualitative stage. The paper's amount was classified in taxonomy to show CT's principal tools and initiates applied to children early. To conclude this survey, an extensive discussion about the terms and authors related to this research area is present.