The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between students’ attitudes toward programming, gender, and learning performances. The survey used for measuring students’ attitudes toward programming consisted of 20 questions on a five-point Likert scale in five dimensions (meaningfulness, interest in programming, self-efficacy, creativity, and collaboration). Ninety freshmen who had basic programming experience by using block-based programming in the Innovation in Educational Technology course were asked to take the survey. The overall reliability of the survey was found to be 0.93. The results showed that there was no significant difference between male and female freshmen in attitude toward programming, but there was a significant difference among different learning performances in dimensions of interest in programming, self-efficacy, and creativity. We performed pairwise comparisons at the same level of significance by using Fisher’s least significant difference (LSD) method to test which group differs from the other groups. The results found that low-performing students’ attitudes toward programming in dimensions of interest in programming, self-efficacy, and creativity were the lowest of all types of students. This is a challenge for instructors in planning learning activities to encourage low-performing students to have a more positive attitude toward programming.

The COVID 19 pandemic has affected global education. In Thailand, all educational institutions temporarily closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. However, teaching and learning still need to be continued. It is necessary to switch the learning activities to online learning. In this study, we designed online learning activities for developing computational thinking (CT) of students and carried out an experiment with 90 participants (first-year students enrolled in a Bachelor of Education Program in educational technology and communications at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi). At the beginning of the experiment, all participants were asked to take a CT test to measure their CT. The test is consistent with other CT tests under validation. During the sessions, all participants were taught by Thunkable. After the experiment, they took the CT test again. The results show that by improving CT through block-based programming projects, students’ performance improved significantly. In conclusion, block-based programming and working in pairs are combinations that can potentially help students to perform better, in turn affecting their performance in projects.

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