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Educational Programming as a Strategy for the Development of Logical-Mathematical Thinking

Abstract:

The purpose of educational programming is to teach children to write code so a computer can perform the task autonomously. Multiple skills participate in this process and lead the student to develop different types of thinking one of those being logical-mathematical. This study focuses on describing how such thinking develops, through the use of educational coding activities. To this end, an online educational programming course was created for 313 children aged 6 to 12 that involved students and coding in a fun way. All of this was done to measure how this influences the development of mathematical skills. The results show that there is a direct relationship between the aforementioned thinking and the direct engagement in coding practices. Problem-solving skills showed notorious improvements. The usage of a block-based programming platform was needed to achieve these results. In conclusion, educational programming is a potential new tool for 21st century education practices, mainly due to the improvement found by applying the same logical thinking needed for coding in daily life.