Young students’ enactment patterns in visual programming – 'plan-driven' or 'in-the-moment'

Visual programming has become a popular way to provide young students with the opportunity to engage in complex problem-solving, often referred to as computational thinking. Most frameworks for computational thinking are comprehensive yet lack a fine-grained perspective on young students’ engagement in programming. Therefore, this paper aims to unpack young students’ enacted problem-solving as they engage in open-ended programming in a visual programming environment (VPE). Through the lens of abstracting and decomposing, we contribute with a close-up understanding of how young students tackle complex problems in a VPE. Data generated in a Swedish first-grade classroom consisted of screen recordings and plans from 13 student pairs, working during four lessons to produce animated stories in ScratchJr. Through the analysis, six enactment patterns were constructed, showing that students as young as seven to eight years old can solve problems involving multiple components, arranging them into cohesive solutions. There were major differences in the problem-solving process involving whether or not the students followed their plans, captured in plan-driven and in-the-moment enactment patterns. Plan-driven enactment patterns elicited shifts within abstracting and decomposing practices, which we consider essential for programming since such enactment patterns more often elicit complex problem-solving. The results suggest that young students should be encouraged to use plans extensively when working in a VPE.