Digital programming in mathematics education: a systematic scoping review

Digital programming has become part of school mathematics in many countries, yet research in this area remains dispersed. In this systematic scoping review, we map how digital programming is defined, why it is included, and which mathematical content areas are examined in primary and secondary mathematics education. We include peer-reviewed empirical studies and reviews published in English since 2006 that focus on digital programming in primary and secondary mathematics education. Searches are conducted in ERIC, Scopus, and Web of Science, complemented by manual searches. Screening and coding are carried out in EPPI-Reviewer using double-blind procedures and a combination of descriptive coding and categorization. In total, 90 studies are included. We find that the research is dominated by block-based tools and concentrates mainly on geometry. Programming is often defined with reference to computational thinking and discussed in close connection with computational thinking.