The Role of Computational Thinking in the Preparation of Pre-Service Teachers

Why Pre-Service Teachers

Currently, there are not enough teachers available to adequately teach programming languages to students (Stephenson, 2009; Tondeur, Van, Sang, Voogt, Fisser, & Ottenbreit-Leftwich, 2012). Programming languages are a part of a Computer Science major, but Computer Science graduates often prefer not to teach programming languages since it pays more to get a job in industry than it does to teach in a K-12 environment. And while most educators recognize the importance of incorporating programming or computational thinking into K-12 curricula, most classroom teachers are not adequately prepared to implement these activities. In fact, 9 out of 10 U.S. K-12 schools don’t offer programming language classes (Partovi, 2015). Proponents of computational thinking point out that while it shares elements with mathematical, engineering it also extends each of those thinking skills in a unique way (Lee et al., 2011).