Review on the teaching of programming and computational thinking in the world

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that computational thinking, composed of the skills of abstraction, decomposition, algorithmization, debugging, and problem-solving, is the fundamental skill for scientific, technological, and economic development for the twenty-first century. However, this diagnosis that is unveiled in rich countries remains nebulous for poor countries. The problem is that education in computational thinking is fundamental for countries to insert themselves in the international arena in an advantageous way and thus achieve the welfare goals for the population of each country. The objective of this research was to make a bibliographic review that shows the state of the art in the teaching of computer programming and computational thinking in the 5 continents. In the review, the advances in the countries of Europe, North America, Oceania, and Asia were observed, whereas in Latin America and Africa, the advances are still basic in some countries and non-existent in others. This review is based on Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). The main search terms were “Computational thinking” and “Teaching computer programming.” The search was performed in the ACM, Conference on Computational Thinking Education (Hong-Kong), Google Scholar, WOS, and SCOPUS databases, from October until December 2020, whose publication year was from 2016 onward. One of the main results found is that the teaching of computational thinking in England was implemented in schools in 2014; in Germany, it has been implemented since 2016 at a transversal level in universities; in South Korea, China, and Taiwan, it has been implemented since 2016. However, in Latin America and Africa governments, the subject is still not considered.