Text-based Programming in Elementary School: A Comparative Study of Programming Abilities in Children with and without Block-based Experience

This paper describes an elementary school intervention to teach a text-based programming language to 10-11 year old students. We compare students with no previous programming experience with students with 3 semesters of experience with a block-based programming language. We analyze students' performance and learning based on detailed logs in an online programming platform and on multiple choice tests. Although both groups have a similar percentage of syntactical errors, the experienced group showed a better performance on exam scores and a lower number of test case errors. These findings suggest that, 10-11 year old students benefit from block-based experience when learning a new text-based programming language.