Coding: First Steps from Kindergarten up to Primary School

Computational thinking is now featured in many school curricula around the world. It is in fact defined as the "new English", emphasizing its universally recognized indispensability. Despite this, the subject is almost never addressed until primary school where, however, hours dedicated to it are often too limited. Our first training proposal, including basic coding concepts in kindergarten, led to better results than expected in terms of children’s understanding and involvement. Our field training has led to a refinement and expansion of the program in these past three years. The primary objective is to begin the study of coding at the age of three, when the foundations of logical thinking are actually already present, due to get to the writing of the first programs in pseudocode and analysis of programming languages at the end of elementary school. All methodologies used are chosen on the basis of the possibility of following a single logical trend, which gradually increases the concepts to be learned and their difficulty, but always starting from already known bases, previously addressed. This allows to optimize learning times by minimizing the necessary hours and human resources and still obtaining the desired results. In addition to not burdening the number of hours available, a further firm point was not to burden schools economically either: costs were in fact always achievable without any problems. Having no impact either on the budget, or on the number of hours, or on the required staff makes this program easily feasible for any school.