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First-year computer science (CS1) university students traditionally have difficulties understanding how to program. This paper describes research introducing CS1 students to programming concepts using a Scratch programming language guided visual execution environment (VEE). The concepts addressed are those from an introductory programming course (sequences, variables, operators, conditionals, loops, and events and parallelism). The VEE guides novice students through programming concepts, explaining and guiding interactive exercises executed in Scratch by using metaphors and serious games. The objective of this study is, firstly, to investigate if a cohort of 124 CS1 students, from three distinct groups, studying at the same university, are able to improve their programming skills guided by the VEE. Secondly, is the improvement different for various programming concepts? All the CS1 students were taught the module by the same tutor in four 2-h sessions (8 h), and a qualitative research approach was adopted. The results show students significantly improved their programming knowledge, and this improvement is significant for all the programming concepts, although greater for certain concepts such as operators, conditionals, and loops than others. It also shows that students lacked initial knowledge of events and parallelism, though most had used Scratch during their high school years. The sequence concept was the most popular concept known to them. A collateral finding in this study is how the students' previous knowledge and learning gaps affected grades they required to access and begin study at the university level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational thinking (CT) is a key skill in the 21st century. However, it is not clear which is the most effective way to acquire and improve CT. Big research efforts are made to determine which pedagogical means should be used. One research trend is based on the idea that teaching programming since Primary Education suffices to improve CT. In our previous work, we proposed and validated a methodology based on metaphors and used of Scratch (MECOPROG) to teach basic programming concepts to children. It is our hypothesis H that by applying MECOPROG, students will develop their CT. To check H, we carried out an experiment with 132 Primary Education Students (9–12 years in age). At the beginning of the experiment, all students were asked to fill in a programming concepts test and two tests to measure their CT. During the sessions, all students were taught according to MECOPROG. Finally, they took the three tests again. A significant increase in the results on all the tests has been measured, supporting the use of metaphors and Scratch to teach computer programming concepts to Primary Education students to develop their CT. • Computational Thinking can be improved using metaphors and Scratch. • Primary Education students' Computational Thinking can be improved. • Primary Education students can learn basic programming concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]