  Most efforts to incorporate computational thinking in K-12 education have
been focused on students in their first cycles of school education and have
used visual tools, such as Scratch and Alice. Fewer research projects have
studied the development of computational thinking in students in their last
years of school, who usually have not had early formal preparation to acquire
these skills. This study provides evidence of the effectiveness of teaching
programming in C++ (a low-level language) to develop computational thinking in
high school students in Chile. By applying a test before and after a voluntary
C ++ programming workshop, the results show a significant improvement in
computational thinking at the end of the workshop. However, we also observed
that there was a tendency to drop out of the workshop among students with lower
levels of initial computational thinking. Tenth-grade students obtained lower
final scores than eleventh and twelfth-grade students. These results indicate
that teaching a low-level programming language is useful, but it has high
entry-barriers.
