Computational Thinking in Swedish high schools : A study investigating the impact of visual programming

Sammanfattning: This study aims to investigate CT in relation to students’ experience with visual programming - particularly visual programming language Scratch. The study looks at the level of CT among Swedish high school students. Two research questions are investigated; one related to students’ general programming experience, one related to their level of experience with programming language Scratch. The method used in the study is the Computational Thinking test (CTt). Data from 162 students is presented. The study finds that the students’ performance is relatively high, but not as high as expected given the fact that Swedish education has become heavily focused on teaching programming in recent years. The study also finds that the level of Scratch experience alone is not found to impact the performance, which implies that Scratch does not allow users to deepen their CT knowledge the more they use it. Visual programming is found to play an important role in the level of computational thinking, although the participants with the best results have additional experience of normal programming. The study concludes that visual programming needs to be combined with normal programming in order for students to achieve the best result within computational thinking