Student-identified themes around computation in high school physics
Theodore E. Bott, Daniel P. Weller, Marcos Daniel Caballero, Paul W. Irving · 2020
In response to the growing emphasis on computational thinking in recent multi-state education standards, as well as the ever-changing applicability of computation in both educational and professional realms, we are developing a survey which evaluates the attitudes of students exposed to computational learning activities in their high school physics classrooms.We administered a pilot questionnaire in classrooms with computation integrated into their physics curricula and conducted a thematic analysis on student responses.Several expected themes (identified previously from teacher interviews) and emergent themes (emerging from open-ended responses to the survey) arose in our analysis.This work focuses on three main themes: the applicability of physics ideas in coding, computational thinking practices, and the usefulness of computation.We provide an in-depth discussion of response variation and its impact on future survey development.This work lays the foundation for the development of a robust and validated survey that assesses students' opinions, expectations, and attitudes towards learning computation in their science classes.