Computational Thinking as Play
Gesu India, Geetha Ramakrishna, Jyoti Bisht, Manohar Swaminathan · 2019
Torino is a tangible programming environment designed for teaching the computational thinking curriculum in the UK to children who are blind or low vision (henceforth, just children) in an inclusive setting. In this paper we describe the experience of children in Bangalore, India, when Torino was introduced to them as a toy for creating and sharing stories, songs and music. We conducted 12 play sessions with 12 children (4 girls and 8 boys) with diverse backgrounds belonging to three different schools for the blind. We briefly present the reasons for play being central to our effort of bringing computational thinking to children who are blind and low vision in India, and share some experiences of the children and some insights that we have gathered so far: Children not only enjoyed every session, they rapidly moved from playing with pre-created examples, to making changes, to demanding that their favorite stories be told. In observing such play, we could infer that they have grasped the basic concepts of computational thinking? flow of control, variables, loops? though not articulated in that vocabulary.