The aim of this work is to analyze different programming environments for beginning students that facilitate the development of computational thinking skills, program creation and transition to a text-based programming language. A quasi-experimental methodological design was used, since it did not work with a control group. A mixed exploratory investigation was carried out. The study group consisted of 34 first-year students from the Professional School of Education of the National University of San Agustin de Arequipa. The results show that teaching with block-based programming environments facilitates the understanding of programming concepts. Code.org and turtle with Python were the most preferred tools for learning programming, making them suitable for transitioning to a textual programming language. The programming environments used allowed the development of skills related to computational thinking.