Final Degree Project - BlueThinking
Research shows that teaching children computer programming helps them develop important 21st century skills, such as planning, problem solving, and flexibility of thinking. Furthermore, from an economic and developmental point of view, educational interventions that start at an early age are associated with lower costs and longer lasting effects than interventions that start later in childhood. However, teaching these skills to young children is not an easy task, as the existing tools on the market do not seem to be well adapted for them.
The objective of this Final Degree Project is to develop BlueThinking, an application to learn programming in early stages as well as providing a system for student management teachers (offering different personalized aids according to the student) and project management.
Different preliminary evaluations were carried out with children of 5 and 6 years to obtain the first impressions of the application and to detect possible problems. Another important part is the teachers to whom a usability evaluation was carried out, to collect their different impressions of the management of students and projects.
The results collected from the different tests carried out show that the degree of satisfaction of the children with the application was high, as was the evaluation made to teachers on the management of projects and students.
Therefore, we believe that BlueThinking contains a suitable student and project management system, which provides different settings, which allow it to be used with young children and children with special needs, to help them develop the aforementioned skills, as well as to present them in a subtle way to the world of programming.
The official website of the project is http://bluethinking.es/ , this project has been financed by Fundación Orange.
Thanks to this project on June 25-28, 2019 in Donostia, Gipuzkoa, Spain. Make the presentation at the XX International Conference on Human Computer Interaction of the article, BlueThinking, a programming tool for the development of executive functions at childhood. Which has been published in the magazine ACM with the DOI: 10.1145/3335595.3335640.