The effect of coding environments on middle school students achievement,attitude and computational thinking skills

The aim of this study is to reveal the effect of middle school students' academic achievements and attitudes towards programming and their computational thinking skills in different coding environments. The study group of the study consists of three randomly selected classes from six sixth grade branches in a secondary school in the central district of Bolu province. Scratch, a block-based visual programming environment, mBlock, a block-based visual programming environment, and Python environments, a text-based programming environment, are assigned to randomly selected classes. Quasi-experimental design was used in this study. First of all, the computational thinking test to measure the computational thinking skills of the students as a pre-test and the computer programming attitude scale to measure their attitudes towards programming were applied to the selected classes. Following the application of the pre-tests, the lesson plans and activities prepared by the researcher were applied to each group for two hours a week for eight weeks. At the end of 8 weeks, the students were applied the computational thinking test to measure the effect of their computing thinking skills, the computer programming attitude scale to measure their attitudes towards programming, and the coding achievement test developed by the researcher to measure their academic achievements. Basically, correlated samples t-test, ANOVA and ANCOVA tests were applied to analyze the data. When the computational thinking test scores of the students were compared with the covariance analysis, no significant difference was found between the averages of the computational thinking test posttest scores corrected according to the computational thinking test pretest score of the Scratch, mBlock and Python groups. When the students' computer programming attitude scale scores were compared with the covariance analysis, a significant difference was found between the averages of the programming attitude scale posttest scores corrected according to the programming attitude scale pretest score of the groups. According to the multiple comparison results, the programming attitude scale scores of the students in the mBlock group were significantly higher than the programming attitude scale scores of the students in the Scratch group and the programming attitude scale scores of the students in the Python group, but no significant difference was found between the programming attitude scale scores of the students in the Scratch and Python groups. Finally, one-way analysis of variance was used for unrelated samples to determine whether there was a significant difference between the coding success test averages of the groups. A statistically significant difference was observed between at least two of the coding achievement test average of students in the Scratch, mBlock and Python group. As a result of the multiple comparison test, when the coding success test scores were examined, it was observed that the significant difference in the Scratch and Python group was in favor of Scratch and the significant difference in the mBlock and Python group was in favor of mBlock.