Since the production of the personal computer researchers have tried to lower the barriers of programming to children by inventing more intuitive programming languages and platforms where they can interact and develop programming skills. Many attempts have been made with LOGO language, Lego/LOGO, and in 2007 the MIT Lifelong Kindergarten developed Scratch, a platform where children are able to build multimedia presentations and games using a language inspired on the connections of Lego bricks where children uses programming blocks to build algorithms. Most of these approaches are focused on certain age ranges and normally demands that the child are able to read which limitates the starting age to six years old and following the same principle described by Papert in 1980 that since the LOGO creation, everyone involved in teaching programming to children should try to lower the barriers to knowledge, this research affirms that prescholar children are able to start developing programmings skills through the hypothesis that “programming games enable children to develop and improve their programming skills”.
Based on popular programming games such as LightBot (
While analyzing the data an important fact was noticed, many children when started a new level had a significant decrease on their score, in order to better represent these situations the charts presented as result of the data analysis every attempt that starts a level was represented by a blue dot and every other attempts were represented by a green dot on the attempts axis. As an example of how the data was presented the following chart is the results of a five year old child.
All of the involved children demonstrated interest on the game, and completed at least the first level, which suggests that preschoolers are able to start developing programming skills.