Abstract:

Every year universities receive many new students in STEM areas with very different profiles and backgrounds. The training and learning of program coding by young people in the technological revolution we are living can be also a school of other skills. Particularly, critical thinking is an ability that should be developed while doing those technological tasks.

Students often tend to show them as self-confident by answering questions quickly, not having thought too much about them. One aspect that clearly shows the need to teach them to be more reflexive is that students accept as valid the results of any computer program that does not fail in its execution. But not always a well developed code gives reliable results. We will check if students are able to find some deliberate mistakes we have introduced while doing practical exercises using computer algorithms. These errors are related to concepts and meaning, not to the execution. Besides, we want to analyze if the background, gender, type of school they are attending influence the critical thinking of these young students.

In this work, we will present the results of several programming workshops that aimed at analyzing the abilities of pre-university students in STEM areas. The experiment consists in teaching the students how to use R programming language to develop attractive mathematical algorithms. The sessions are divided in 4 steps of increasing level of difficulty. To motivate the students and broaden the scope, the algorithms are framed in a historical context of relevant mathematicians such as Pythagoras, Fibonacci and Gauss.

So far, we have available data from the following workshops: Science Week 2018 (with 148 participating students, general orientation), Science Week 2019 (to be known) and 4ESO-Industry Days (with 27 STEM orientation participants).

During the workshops, the students fill a survey about their perceptions along the different steps of the learning process. Some indicators on critical thinking have been analyzed based on the answers. The study compares the results by gender, by STEM orientation of the students and by the type of school (public-private).

Some conclusions can be drawn that will help to develop the thinking capacity of the students.

Keywords:

Critical thinking, computer programming, algorithm, STEM.