Design and Application of a Game Activity-Based Unplugged Programming Curriculum for Elementary Schools

A series of unplugged programming courses based on game activities has been designed and developed to reduce the difficulty of programming courses in elementary school and to develop computational thinking skills in elementary school students. Four components were designed for the course: course objectives, course content, course activities, and course evaluation. A controlled experiment was performed to validate the course's influence on developing learners' computational thinking, and a questionnaire was employed to examine the experimental class learners' experience with the course. The results found that the level of computational thinking in the experimental class was also significantly different from the pretest, and the students in the experimental class rated each item of the course above 7 points. This indicates that this course has a significant effect on cultivating students' computational thinking, and the learners had a good learning experience and made gains from this course.