Abstract:

The title of this paper – The Teacher and Computational Thinking In Basic School in the Age of Artificial Intelligence– was conceived for a project to be carried out with elementary school and college teachers in Brazil, Portugal, Cape Verde and Angola. This paper presents the development of this project between March 2021 and the present day – it is ongoing remotely –, with the participation of 12 teachers from the respective countries. The project proposes to offer these teachers training in the context of computational thinking, and to assess the impact of these teachers’ understanding on their respective concepts and practices. The term computational thinking offers a new approach in the field of cognitive science, through the premise of systematizing the steps of problem solving, the algorithm; it can be applied to other sciences, and its insertion into basic education develops a different abstraction ability, that helps children in solving problems in all fields of life – not just using computers or for future computer scientists. The study was characterized by an action investigation and a reflexive spiral consisting of four phases that articulated and complemented each other recursively: planning, action, observation and reflection and organized according to three objectives: academic research; innovation and skills training. The contributions and involvement of teachers in the synchronous meetings were significant, and some proposals for activities were conceived, characterizing the early stages of the reflective spiral and will be outlined in this paper.

Keywords:

Computational Thinking, Continuing Teacher Education, Technologies, Mathematics Education, Algorithms.