Abstract:

Even though in this rapidly digitalizing society more and more of our day-to-day lives and social interaction is happening in virtual environments that are fundamentally based on program code, most of us continue to live our lives happily ignorant of these languages that make up most of our daily working, leisure and communication environments. Computational thinking is considered an increasingly important skill in many frameworks of 21st century competence created by different important players nationally and internationally (e.g. NRC, 2011; EDUFI, 2014). Computational thinking (CT), by definition, means applying mental tools, concepts, practices and perspectives fundamental to the field of computer science to solving problems, designing systems and understanding human behaviour (Wing 2006; Brennan & Resnick 2012). Skills related to CT have been estimated to be in the everyday use of all citizens by 2050 (Wing, 2011), which is why research intended to grapple the important pedagogical aspects related to the training of these skills is highly important. To address the digital divide and to prepare children for their digital ecologies before touching a single device, endeavours have been made to develop non-digital, play-based activities to teach CT (Bell, Freeman & Grimley, 2009).

This research tackles the topic of children’s conceptual change in CT during a mainly unplugged CT intervention summer school based on the Hello Ruby universe (Liukas, 2015) in the June of 2016. The research aims of the current study were:

Did any conceptual change take place during a primarily wireless, play-oriented summer school concerning the (participants) CT? If yes, how did the conceptual change manifest itself on the level of:
1. attitudes, emotions and motivations?
2. knowledge and understanding?
3. computational skills?

The data of the study were videotaped, one-on-one interviews conducted before and after the intervention period, in the intervention group (n=6) and two comparison groups: a material- and a comparative activity group (n=4+4). The groups were age-coherent, consisting primarily of 8-year-old, Finnish-speaking children to ensure the comparability of the answers. The interview included a concept explanation section and a think-aloud skills section with tasks similar but not identical to the ones found in the Hello Ruby –books, scored and analyzed qualitatively.

The results indicated that the CT intervention group could explain more concepts and applications more precisely and correctly than the other groups also giving implications of conceptual change in addition to conceptual accretion (Chi, 1992). They also more often mentioned changed primary interests than the comparison groups, and seemed generally more empowered and technologically optimistic by all the things they had created during the summer school. The participants who had improved their performance in the think-aloud tasks belonged to the intervention and the material groups, which indicates the effect of the education. It was also discovered the more meticulous CT skills go very tightly hand in hand with general mathematical understanding, such as multiplication tables. Games seem to provide transfer and speed up the performance of at least the lower level decoding kinds of tasks as well, and the children who had played games during leisure time showed more efficient strategies in solving decoding tasks regardless of the summer activity they had participated in.

Keywords:

Computational thinking, conceptual change, children, programming, technology, programming education, 21st century skills, digital divide.