A Mapping Study of Computational Thinking and Programming in Brazilian K-12 Education

This research full paper characterizes the literature on academic initiatives to foster computational thinking and programming (CT&P) in Brazilian K-12 education. Context: Mapping and analyzing the diversity of experiences and studies that address CT&P in K-12 education can bring valuable data to researchers. This work delimits such study to the Brazilian scenario to allow a more in-depth view, given the Brazilian context. Previous surveys and systematic mapping studies present recent publications in major Brazilian computing journals and conferences. Although they offer important contributions, they do not comprehensively cover the Brazilian literature on CT&P in K-12 education, since they focus the search in the Brazilian Computer Society publications alone. Objective: This work proposes to characterize the literature on CT&P in K-12 education in Brazil. Results: through a systematic mapping study, we collected information on year, venue, type, K-12 education stage and modality, methodological contexts, and used tools and programming languages from 338 selected primary studies from 2001 until 2016. Conclusions: there is a significant increase in the number of Brazilian studies in the latest years, showing a growing interest on this research area as well as several trends and gaps to be addressed by both researchers and practitioners.