BlueThinking, a programming tool for the development of executive functions at childhood

Abstract

Research shows that teaching computer programming to children help them develop important 21st century skills such as planning, problem solving, and flexibility of thinking. However, teaching these skills to young children is not an easy task as the existing tools in the market do not seem to be well adapted for them. The aim of this work is to present BlueThinking, an inclusive application to learn programming at early stages. A preliminary evaluation with 5 and 6 years old children was carried out to get the first impressions of the application and detect possible issues. The results show that the degree of children satisfaction with the application was high. Therefore, we believe BlueThinking could be easily used with young children to help them developing the aforementioned skills as well as to introduce them in a subtle way to the world of computer programming.