Programming and computer science are nowadays taught to younger and
younger children. Still, the methodology applied for programing
education in elementary school is usually graphical programming, with
environments such as Scratch and Alice being highly popular. We have
previously conducted a study about teaching programming concepts to ten
year olds in Finland. In the study, play-based learning with kinesthetic
exercises was compared to graphical programming. According to these
previous results, the students using play-based approach outperformed
the graphical programming group statistically significantly in the
posttest.

In this study, we repeated the study with the same
approach in a Spanish elementary school. A setup was kept as similar as
possible to that in Finland, except for translating the materials into
Spanish. Surprisingly, the results are quite different to the results in
Finland, as in Spain, neither of the groups showed significant
differences between the pretest and the posttest results. We discuss
about the possible causes of the differences between the Finnish and
Spanish experiments in detail.