Research questions and approaches for computational thinking curricula design
Juri Valtanen, Eleni Berki, Aleksi Tiensuu, Kira Grigoriadou · 2017
Teaching computational thinking (CT) is argued to be necessary but also admitted to be a very challenging task. The reasons for this, are: i) no general agreement on what computational thinking is; ii) no clear idea nor evidential support on how to teach CT in an effective way. Hence, there is a need to develop a common approach and a shared understanding of the scope of computational thinking and of effective means of teaching CT. Thus, the consequent ambition is to utilize the preliminary and further research outcomes on CT for the education of the prospective teachers of secondary, further and higher/adult education curricula. This research study comprises a proposal for carrying out research and development practices regarding the teaching and integration of mathematical and computational thinking in the curricula. The emphasis is put on the following research agenda, aiming at: a) clarifying the meaning of CT and its scope, b) identifying cross-curricula and other approaches for teaching CT, c) providing a generic curriculum design for CT for students and teachers and d) finding possible obstacles, limitations and bottlenecks for the realisation and evaluation of the previous.