Exploration of computational thinking of software engineering novice students based on solving computer science tasks
Vladimiras Dolgopolovas, Tatjana Jevsikova, Valentina Dagienė, Loreta Savulionienė · International journal of engineering education · 2016
During the recent years computational thinking has been actively promoted through the K-12 curriculum, highereducation, contests, and many other initiatives. Computational thinking skills are important for a further students’educational and professional career. Our focus is on computational thinking for software engineering novice students, aterm meant to encompass a set of concepts and thought processes that are helpful in formulating problems and theirsolutions. Annually organized international challenge on Informatics and Computational Thinking ‘‘Bebras’’ hasdeveloped many tasks to promote deep thinking skills in this area. It is important to motivate students to solve variousinformatics or computer science tasks and evaluate their computational thinking abilities. The paper presents a studyconducted among first-year students of software engineering, studying the structured programming course. As aninstrument to measure computational thinking, a test of internationally approved and well-preselected tasks from the‘‘Bebras’’ challenge has been suggested and validated. The correlation between the students’ test results and the structuredprogramming course results has been investigated. We conclude with a discussion and future directions to enhancecomputational thinking skills of novice software engineering students.