Effects on the school performance of teaching programming in elementary and secondary schools

Abstract

The aim of this report is to describe some aspects of teaching programming to teenagers from 10 to 13 years old. The examples, data and impressions were taken from some courses given in public and private schools in Mexico, Switzerland and Colombia. The paper is organized as follows: It starts with a description of the didactic proposal of ABZ-ETHZ under which the courses were given. Then the observations and reflexions are described with respect to several considerations: (a) The ubiquitous recreational and social use that children and young people make of the technology, (b) their motivation for programming, (c) reading and writing in language acquisition and ((d) strengthening and applying mathematics as a decisive aspect of the ability to think logically.