Using Microworlds to Teach Basic Programming Concepts to Future Early Childhood Education Teachers

Abstract

Nowadays, there is a wide range of tools designed to teach programming skills, whose effectiveness has been verified, according to the current literature. In this line, this article presents a case study carried out through 8 classes of 90 minutes each, to teach basic programming concepts (variables, sequences, loops and conditionals), to students (N=52) of the first year of the degree "Early Childhood Education", who in the future will be able to teach their students programming skills. For this purpose, the tools Code.org, ScratchJr and CoSpaces have been used, with which the students have previously familiarized themselves, reviewing their usability, learning the programming commands used in each one of them and achieving a conceptual understanding of coding. In addition, it has been checked whether the students are able to correctly use the programming blocks and improve their ability to verbally explain what programming is. Also, it has been verified that the attractiveness of the tools, that is, the user interface and its design, is significantly related to the learning of computer programming by future teachers.