“My own experiences over the last decade engaging middle and high school students in numerous computational activities (from programming games and stories in Scratch to Robotics to mobile app programming using App Inventor, and currently as a middle school CS teacher as part of my doctoral research) have been that while children comfortably learn the WHAT (blocks or syntax) of programming languages and environments, the HOW and WHY is much harder as they construct programming solutions.
If the goal is to develop robust thinking skills while kids are being creative, collaborative, participatory and all that other good stuff, the focus of the learning needs to go beyond the tool, the syntax of a programming language and even the work products to the deeper thinking skills. While the fun features afforded by these programming environments make for great engagement, they often draw away focus to the artifacts, many of which employ relatively thin use of computational thinking.”
“computing is greater than coding”
+infos: LINK