Coding as a practical skill and computational thinking (CT) as a cognitive ability have become an important topic in education and research. It has been suggested that CT, as an early predictor of academic success, should be introduced and fostered early in education. However, there is no consensus on the underlying cognitive correlates of CT in young elementary school children. Therefore, the present work aimed at (i) assessing CT and investigating its associations to established cognitive abilities, and (ii) evaluating a newly developed CT course for elementary school children.

As such, 31 7-10-year-old children took part in 10 lessons of a structured CT course. The course aimed at introducing and fostering CT concepts in both unplugged and plugged-in ways, incorporating life-size board games, Scratch, Scratch for Arduino, and Open Roberta programming environments. In a pre-/post-test design, we assessed several cognitive abilities using standardized tests on nonverbal-visuospatial and verbal reasoning abilities, numeracy, as well as short-term memory, and measured CT using an adapted version of the only existing validated test CTt, to accommodate it to the younger sample.

We identified significant associations between CT and nonverbal-visuospatial reasoning, as well as different aspects of numeracy (e.g., fact retrieval and problem completion). In line with recent theoretical accounts and empirical investigations for other age groups, these findings specify the underlying cognitive mechanism of CT in elementary school. Moreover, our results indicated that students were able to specifically improve their CT abilities through the course, as assessed by the adapted version of the CTt.