The development of computational thinking: a constructionist school computer programming initiative in a girls' primary school

Abstract

In September 2025, the newly established Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) curriculum was rolled out in primary schools across Ireland with the intent to provide opportunities for students to learn the fundamentals of programming and build on their computational thinking skills. To date, much of the research on the learning of programming and computational thinking has been conducted with older students or in informal settings. Therefore, this study was conducted in a primary school context to investigate if primary school students could develop their computational thinking through engaging in programming activities. Sixty-seven students from third, fifth and sixth classes in an Irish primary school took part in a ten-week Scratch programming initiative designed to foster their computational thinking. Various data collection methods were adopted to capture the multidimensional nature of computational thinking, including artefact analysis, artefact-based interviews, questionnaires and an observation diary. Brennan and Resnick’s (2012) three computational thinking dimensions (concepts, practices and perspectives) were used to interpret the data, before deductive and inductive analyses were adopted to conceptualise the nature of the dimensions. Findings indicate that the primary school students in this study excelled at both synchronisation and parallelism, with many students illustrating an understanding of more challenging concepts such as state synchronisation and parallel launching of multiple scripts. However, conditional loops and variable initialisation caused significant difficulty, with further analysis revealing that students would require further scaffolding to acquire these concepts. This research gave insights into the poorly defined computational practices and perspectives, providing teachers, researchers and policymakers with a more comprehensive picture of how these dimensions can manifest in a primary school classroom. In presenting thick descriptions of these students’ experience, this research also highlights pedagogical factors that shaped and supported their computational thinking development, including programming language, project type, level of scaffolding and peer engagement. Finally, a reconfigured computational thinking framework is proposed, identifying aspects of computational thinking that were not sufficiently captured by the Brennan and Resnick (2012) framework.