Abstract:

Computational Thinking (CT) has gained a great interest over the last years as a major set of skills, which promotes new ways of thinking to students of all grades across all subjects. As a result, a substantial increase of interest in teaching practices is observed. Those practices aim at improving the CT level of the students, since many scientists believe that CT is a cognitive which has to be essentially added to the analytical skills of all students. As far as primary education is concerned, the bibliography offers a series of attempts have been made both with the use of digital tools but also through conventional means of teaching that do not require digital means. All these practices set the basis for more complete future approaches. To this end, the current study presents a pilot study conducted to 14 Greek students attending primary school (6th grade), attempting to cultivate the concept of automation within an organized learning environment through the MS Excel Spreadsheets with the aim of developing CT in the students at the same time. Students were taught procedures for automating solutions to everyday problems through the use of Excel Recorded-Macros (ERM) for the cultivation of their CT-skills, without using programming commands. The proposed teaching framework was designed after taking into account bibliography which has shown that research about automation is still lacking. The results of the study showed that the innovative proposed teaching intervention (ERM Curriculum) in general is suitable for the specific age group of students, which concurrently seems to cultivate both CT-competences and the automation thinking of the students. For students CT-skills assessment before and after the proposed didactic intervention, an adapted version of Computational Thinking Test (CTt) in Greek culture -firstly developed in Spain by ‪Marcos Román-González‬ and his research team- was used. ‬

Keywords:

Computational thinking, automation, excel recorded-macros curriculum, primary education.