COEDU-IN Project: an inclusive co-educational project for teaching computational thinking and digital skills at early ages

Abstract

Learning to program is the new literacy of the 21st century. Computational thinking, closely related to programming, requires thinking and solving problems with different levels of abstraction and is independent of hardware devices. The early childhood education stage provides teachers with the opportunity to lay the foundations for a comprehensive quality education using innovative tools and technologies. Educational robotics in early childhood education becomes a tool that facilitates the acquisition of knowledge to children, playfully, based on the principles of interactivity, social interrelationships, collaborative work, creativity, constructivist and constructionist learning, and a student-centered didactic approach, allowing in turn that student can acquire digital competencies and develop logical and computational thinking in an underlying way. This project explores the current state of teaching and learning computational thinking and programming in early childhood education in an inclusive manner. Moreover, the lack of diversity and inequality is particularly latent in science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Therefore, this work considers this problem and presents an inclusive coeducation approach to this new literacy, eliminating gender stereotypes and extending them to people with Down syndrome and hospitalized minors.