Board 229: Computational Thinking in the Formation of Engineers: Year 4
Noemi V. Mendoza Díaz, Deborah Trytten, Russ Meier, Harry A. Hogan, So Yoon Yoon · 2024
Computational thinking has evolved to a subject of great interest in all areas of education.The last three years have witnessed an explosive growth of initiatives, studies and even literature reviews.Yet, computational thinking research is still focused on pre-college levels and few studies have investigated it within engineering education at the college level.In this context, our work spearheads the effort to understand computational thinking in the engineering context and advances the current state of knowledge.During the fourth year of this project, the major results have been in dissemination.The validation of our diagnostic has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, the technology transfer offices in the multi-institutional project agreed on intellectual property rights, and a project website was launched to help interested institutions access the diagnostic.The public availability of our validated diagnostic opens an opportunity to engage in another validation cycle with a more diverse pool of participants helping our instrument become better calibrated for extended audiences.In addition, the prior work on engineering enculturation that led to this project was also published in a peer-reviewed journal.An instrument on enculturation that considers computational thinking as one of its constructs is getting validated.Our current focus as we enter the final months of our project is semi-structured interviews with students that struggled (with a grade of D), failed (grade of F), or withdrew (either with a grade of Q for students remaining at the institution, or W for students leaving the institution) in an effort to understand how their performance in computational thinking affected their career trajectories.In addition, we are also completing the longitudinal study of computational thinking development in our student cohorts.