Abstract
The authors conducted a case study focussed on discovering how pupils of primary school (especially Year 3, 4 and 5) acquire, use and understand some programming conditional statements and loops (IF-THEN, IF-THEN-ELSE; REPEAT/ REPEAT-UNTIL). Programming conditional statements are undoubtedly one of the fundamental algorithmic concepts that pupils will need to understand and use in programming and algorithmic thinking development.
How can pupils apply them in programming? Does it make sense to introduce these programming conditional statements into programming activities in primary education? Findings showed that firstly, primary school pupils are able to use programming conditional statements and loops, nevertheless the Year 3 pupils can lose motivation and willigness to work if something is wrong or if they are not successful, and also they can have some linguistic barriers how to describe more details verbally their algorithmic schemes. Secondly, it has a sense to introduce these conditional statements and loops into primary education if we create for pupils conditions to link their concrete ideas based on manual operations (such as with a Lego toy) to their experinces gained in a virtual programming environment (such as Code.org).