Many researches indicate that programming learning could help improve problem solving skills through algorithmic thinking. But in general, programming learning has been focused on programming language features and it also gave a heavy cognitive load to learners. Therefore, this paper proposes a programming activity process to improve novice programming learners' algorithmic thinking efficiently. An experiment was performed to measure the effectiveness of the proposed programming activity process. After the experiment, the learners' perception on programming was shown to be changed, to effective activity in improving problem solving.