Open Educational Resources for Computational Thinking as a Skill for Social Participation in Early Childhood
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.57125/ELIJ.2026.03.25.04Keywords:
computational thinking, digital skills, early childhood education, educational robotics, Open Educational Resources.Abstract
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are positioned as a key element to promote quality education and are especially relevant at a time when computational thinking (CT) has been established as one of the fundamental skills for 21st-century citizenship, yet it is a topic that has received little research in early childhood. This research conducts a qualitative content analysis of OERs in the repositories of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Vocational Training that promote computational thinking for ages 0-6. 17 OER were selected from the Procomún and CodeIntef repositories after applying eligibility criteria and analysed using an 11-category matrix covering CT skills, programming languages, resources, and teaching methodology. The results show that, among computational thinking skills, algorithmic thinking was the most developed, appearing in 14 of 17 OERs. Debugging (n=2) and automation (n=1), skills typically associated with higher levels of learning, were the least present in the proposals. Regarding programming languages, unplugged was the most frequent format (n=9), followed by button panel programming (n=6). Digital keypad is the most abstract programming language present in the proposals and the least common, present in only 3 of the OERs. Looking at the technologies used, 83.3% of the educational robotics used was commercial and proprietary. Only two of the proposals include open-source educational robotics. Analysis of teaching methodologies revealed that direct instruction dominated (76.5%), with constructivist approaches significantly underrepresented. This aligns with the predominant orientation of the proposals: "learning to code" (n=12) over "coding to learn" (n=2). The findings highlight the need for more OERs that employ constructivist methodologies, incorporate open-source resources, and prioritise developing higher-order CT skills, such as debugging and automation, in early childhood education. The analysis of OERs allows us to assess the quality and rigour of the resources included in institutional repositories, which are fundamental to guaranteeing educational equity.
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