An empirical study on designing STEM + AI teaching to cultivate primary school students ' computational thinking perspective
Xing Li, Hui Xiang, Xiaochun Zhou, Jing Huang · 2023
With the development of the era of artificial intelligence (AI), China has put forward the cultivation of computational thinking (CT) in the compulsory education curriculum standard. CT includes three dimensions: CT concept, CT practice and CT perspective. As a part of CT, the development of CT perspective can promote the growth of students ' connection ability, questioning ability and expression ability. CT perspective promotes the formation of computational identity through the internalization of concepts. At present, there are relatively few studies on the CT perspective. Based on this, this study proposes a design-based STEM + AI teaching model, aiming to create a combination of artificial intelligence and interdisciplinary to cultivate pupils ' CT perspective. In this study, a single group of pre-test and post-test experiments were conducted to test the CT perspective of students in third grade of a primary school in Wuhan. The research shows that the design-based STEM + AI teaching has significantly improved the expression ability and questioning ability of primary school students, but the improvement of connection ability is not significant. The implementation of STEM + AI teaching helps students to internalize ideas from the perspective of CT, thus cultivating students ' computational identity.