Abstract:

In 2018, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) proposed a learning framework for the global education goals of 2030, centering on knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values. The aim is to cultivate holistic student competencies, thereby promoting individual and overall societal welfare. STEM courses, integrating the knowledge domains of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, often utilize problem-oriented teaching methods to design thematic courses and activities. Their goal aligns perfectly with the OECD's competency-based education concept, aiming to enhance students' problem-solving abilities.
Within the scope of STEM education, the Internet of Things (IoT) plays a pivotal role. By connecting real-world objects to the internet, IoT creates new opportunities for problem-solving and innovation. It allows students to have learning experiences relevant to the real world, helping them understand and apply STEM concepts. Students can utilize IoT to foster innovative thinking and problem-solving abilities, thereby strengthening their technological literacy and preparing them for future challenges.

Hence, this study has planned a STEM-themed course and activities centered around 'Smart Living' via the Internet of Things (IoT) for university students (N=33) from non-computer science fields. The course uses a student-centered 6E teaching strategy to develop programming educational activities suitable for these non-computer science students. A single-group pre-test and post-test methodology were employed using the following tools: (1) A computational thinking scale - for assessing students' abilities in problem abstraction, decomposition, algorithm design, evaluation, and generalization. (2) A programming test - for assessing students' understanding of variables, data types, operators, arrays, conditionals, for loops, while loops, and flowcharts. Simultaneously, we deeply observe the interrelation among computational thinking, programming, and problem-solving abilities during the learning process. This will provide valuable references for the future planning of competency-based education and programming curriculum.

Keywords:

STEM, Programming instruction, Computational thinking, Problem-solving.