Studies that prove the effectiveness of CS Unplugged?

[Elena Andueza Azcárate]

Hello and thank you for accepting me in the group

My name is Elena. I am a Spanish computer engineer and I am doing a university master's degree to become a high school teacher. During the course of the master, I have known the methodology of teaching computer science without computers and I have fallen in love with it. I firmly believe that it is the way to learn computer science in general and to program in particular because if you don’t link the basic concepts of programming to any technology, you will be able to program in any language. However, if you learn to program using a particular language, you will not learn to program but you will learn only that language.

Now, I am I'm doing an academic work about “cs unplugged” and I need same help. It's a study to see if this manner of teaching programming is better than the traditional manner. I have taught some lessons with”cs unplugged” activities and I have evaluated the results and I'm going to compare them with the results of these students in the lessons done before with the traditional manner and besides, I'm going to compare their results with students of other school where the teacher has taught programming with computers. It is a small academic work. It isn't a doctoral thesis. But I need some theoretical information, the theoretical basis of this way of doing computer science and, above all, I would need to know if there are studies that have proven the effectiveness of this methodology or that have proven their advantages over traditional methodologies. I have thought that in this group maybe I could ask for this information I need or maybe I could find someone that can help me.

Thank you very much (and sorry for my awful English)
Regards,
Elena

[Christian Brackmann]

http://computacional.com.br/documentos/Variados/ROMAN%20-%20Test%20de%20Pensamiento%20Computacional%20dise%C3%B1o%20y%20psicometr%C3%ADa%20general.pdf

[Christian Brackmann]

I have excellent results, but it is unpublished.

Waiting for the reviewers...

[Lennart]

Indeed interesting. If I had anything in mind I would give you references.

Please, let me know what you find out.
Regards,
Lennart Rolandsson

[Maria Beatrice Rapaccini]

Hi Elena,
I am very interested in this kind of study and in the tests proposed to evaluate the computational thinking.
I am a math high school teacher and I started some years ago following in love with a psycomotoric approach (as CS unplugged is) to teach chess and  computer science at the early childhood. https://scacchi012.wordpress.com/
I believe the effectiveness is also depending  on age. Under 7 years the psycomotricity plays an important role on child development.

It is interesting to investigate how students are motivated in solving. Emotion is a relevant part in learning. 
We could start to evaluate the problem solving skills http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_199205_szetala.pdf and how it is relevant to measure the attempt time in problem solving and the skills used to share  the strategy to solve.

Next August I am moving to Sweden ( I will temporarily stop to teach) and I would like to continue to explore unplugged activities (I am looking for a PhD without  grant)

So let me know as well what you discover! :-)
Regards, Beatrice Rapaccini

[Christian Brackmann]

This might help:

Development of Computational Thinking Skills through Unplugged Activities in Primary School

https://doi.org/10.1145/3137065.3137069