Informatics in Education

This study aims to examine the impact of interdisciplinary computational thinking (CT) skills training on primary school teachers’ perceptions of CT skills. The sample of the study consisted of 30 primary school teachers in Istanbul. In this study, where quantitative and qualitative methods were used together, qualitative data were obtained from the teacher identification form. Quantitative data were obtained from the scale for CT skills. After the pre-test was applied to the study group, “CT Skills Training” was applied. During the training, the basic concepts of CT skills and the subskills were covered theoretically and practically. From the quantitative data, the education applied was determined to have had a positive effect on the primary school teachers' perceptions of CT skills. From the qualitative data, it was determined that the participants had a positive opinion about the applied training and thought that they gained skills related to CT.

In computer science education at school, computational thinking has been an emerging topic over the last decade. Even though, computational thinking is interpreted and integrated in classrooms in different ways, an identification process about what computational thinking is about has been in progress among computer science school-teachers and computer science education researchers since Wing's initial paper on the characteristics of computational thinking. On the other hand, the constructionist learning theory by Papert, based on constructivism and Piaget, has a long tradition in computer science education for describing the students' learning process by hands-on activities. Our contribution, in this paper, is to present a new mapping tool which can be used to review classroom activities in terms of both computational thinking and constructionist learning. For the tool, we have reused existing definitions of computer science concepts and computational thinking concepts and combined these with our new constructionism matrix. The matrix's most notable feature is its scale of learners' autonomy. This scale represents the degree of choices learners have at each stage of development of their artefact. To develop the scale definitions, we trialed the mapping tool, coding twenty-one popular international computing activities for pupils aged 5 to 11 (K-5). From our trial, we have shown that we can use the mapping tool, with a moderate to high degree of reliability across coders, to analyse classroom activities with regard to computational thinking and constructionism, however, further validation is needed to establish its usefulness. Despite a small number of activities (n = 21) being analysed with our mapping tool, our preliminary results showed several interesting findings. Firstly, that learner autonomy was low for defining the problem and developing their own design. Secondly that the activity type (such as lesson plan rather than online activity) or artefact created (such as physical artefact rather than onscreen activity or unplugged activity), rather than the computational thinking or computer science concept being taught was related to learner autonomy. This provides some tentative evidence, which may seem obvious, that the learning context rather than the learning content is related to degree of constructionism of an activity and that computational thinking per se may not be related to constructionism. However, further work is needed on a larger number of activities to verify and validate this suggestion.

We present some results of an ongoing research project where university engineering students were asked to construct videogames involving the use of physical systems models. The objective is to help them identify and understand the elements and concepts involved in the modelling process. That is, we use game design as a constructionist approach for promoting a modelling activity and the learning of the elements involved. In this paper, we focus on the case studies of two students, in their last year of studies, who built a videogame where they had to model liquid water behaviour while working within the restrictions of the game engine. By analysing students' written work and group discussions, we observed that students, through this videogame-building task, were able to deepen and refine how they conceive the process of mathematical modelling, in a fun and engaging way in which they were receptive and open to experimentation, and learned from other students, as well as from making mistakes.

In spite of decades of use of agent-based modelling in social policy research and in educational contexts, very little work has been done on combining the two. This paper accounts for a proof-of-concept single case-study conducted in a college-level Social Policy course, using agent-based modelling to teach students about the social and human aspects of urban planning and regional development. The study finds that an agent-based model helped a group of students think through a social policy design decision by acting as an object-to-think-with, and helped students better connect social policy outcomes with behaviours at the level of individual citizens. The study also suggests a set of new issues facing the design of Constructionist activities or environments for the social sciences.

This paper represents a first attempt at constructing a language for describing the potential learning value of computers as a learning material. A lack of precision in describing the value computers add to the learning process has paradoxically made it easy for people to elevate the significance of using computers in pedestrian ways while simultaneously marginalizing higher-order uses such as Logo programming. Colleagues are invited to extend or challenge this paper's hypotheses.