Informatics in Education

This study aims to provide a deeper understanding about the Bebras tasks, which is one of the computational thinking (CT) unplugged activities, in terms of age level, task category, and CT skills. Explanatory sequential mixed method was adopted in the study in order to collect data according to the research questions. The participants of the study were 113,653 school students from different age levels. Anonymous data was collected electronically from the Turkey 2019 Bebras challenge. Factor analysis was employed to reveal the construct validity to determine how accurately the tool measured the abstract psychological characteristics of the participants. In addition, the item discrimination index was calculated to measure how discriminating the items in the challenge were. Qualitative data gathered through the national Bebras workshop was analysed according to content analysis. The findings highlighted some interesting points about the implications of the Bebras Challenge for Turkey, which are discussed in detail. Furthermore, common problems of Bebras tasks are identified and possible suggestions for improvement are listed.

It is important today to prepare pre-service teachers to integrate social media tools into their lessons and to teach them how to use social media as a learning environment for educational context. Based on this, an undergraduate course was designed to fulfil this need. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate the behaviours and perceptions of 27 pre-service teachers enrolled to a 14-week social-media enriched blended course. Facebook was used to support an out-of-class teaching and learning process. During the course, students developed educational content and were informed on how to use social media as a learning environment in an educational context. After implementation, they were asked to respond to an open-ended questionnaire related to the 14-week course process and social media usage in lessons. According to the findings, pre-service teachers stated that the use of social media tools, in addition to face-to-face learning, can enhance the dissemination of announcements, communication between students and instructor, the sharing of instructional activities, discussions, and the use and creation of multimedia tools and applications 24x7, by extending the limits of normal class hours. Most also stated that they would use Facebook for material and announcement sharing once they were in-service teachers. In addition to Facebook, they emphasised that they would also use Prezi, Glogster, MindMeister and Edmodo for their lessons and that they had learnt new concepts and social media tools during the course. They also suggested increasing the number of course hours and reducing course content per course session.