Fostering Future Teachers' Competence in Computational Thinking in an Educational Technology Course

Computational Thinking In Education

Computational thinking (CT) is considered a necessary skill in the 21st century because computers and their related technology are ubiquitous. Wing (2006) argued that computational thinking is a fundamental skill, as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. Computational thinking is a set of ‘mental tools’ to analyse and formulate automatic solutions to a given problem. It is a universally applicable aptitude and skill that can be utilised in daily life. Since everyone should be given the opportunity to develop it, the field of CT in education has been a hot research topic around the world. A meta-review of studies between 2006 and 2017 in this field showed that more and more countries were involved in the studies of CT (Hsu et al., 2018). The number of studies in this field increases a lot in the past 10 years.

In Tang et al.’s (2020) review of previous work in the field of CT studies, they found that the USA was the most productive country while China, Spain, Turkey and UK were keen to research in this area. This seems to imply that more and more countries recognize the importance of CT in education. Since CT is an important skill for new generations to acquire, many educational systems such as England and Japan setup computer science as a school subject where students start learning the basics of coding in primary (Hubwieser et al., 2015). For example, England setup the initiative for students to learn about algorithms and program design at the age of five (Waite et.al, 2020) while Japan has similar plan starting in 2020 (Kanemune et.al, 2017). In Singapore, the government has a clear goal to develop the nation’s computational capability so programs are designed from preschool children to adults (Seow et.al, 2019).

In terms of the CT curriculum, the CT-infused courses were located in a wide range of disciplines stretching through music, languages, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. CT activities usually appear in the form of competitions, extra-curriculum activities, and interdisciplinary learning. Commonly adopted pedagogy in CT literature include games-based learning, collaborative project-based learning, simulations and inquiry approaches. For example, Denner et al. (2012) found from their investigation that female middle school students benefited from an activity involving game construction. To develop CT skills, students have recently been introduced to visually based programming languages to solve authentic problems (Kalelioglu, & Gülbahar, 2014). Alternatively, some young learners are taught with board games to learn CT knowledge (Tsarava et al. 2018). Participants of CT studies ranged from kindergarten children to teacher educators while secondary students were the main target learners.