Title:	TASK-BASED ASSESSMENT OF STUDENTS’ COMPUTATIONAL THINKING SKILLS DEVELOPED THROUGH VISUAL PROGRAMMING OR TANGIBLE CODING ENVIRONMENTS
Author(s):	Takam Djambong, Viktor Freiman
ISBN:	978-989-8533-55-5
Editors:	Demetrios G. Sampson, J. Michael Spector, Dirk Ifenthaler and Pedro Isaías
Year:	2016
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Computational thinking skills, Problem solving tasks, Technology-rich learning environment
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	41
Last Page:	51
Language:	English
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Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	While today’s schools in several countries, like Canada, are about to bring back programming to their curricula, a new conceptual angle, namely one of computational thinking, draws attention of researchers. In order to understand the articulation between computational thinking tasks in one side, student’s targeted skills, and the types of problems they aim to solve, we conducted a small-scale pilot case-study with two groups of students for the elementary (grade 6) and middle (grade 9) grades. While the students were working on 5-week-long curricular units in technology using robotics-based and computer-programming environments, we assessed their computational thinking abilities with 23 tasks given as pre- and post-test. Aiming to validate the tasks, namely, to see in what way it allows measuring computational things, we found a disparity between the types of the skills assessed, the easiness of the tasks, and the age groups, which makes difficult to arrive to some stable conclusion. We stated then a need for a longer and more sophisticated assessment as a subsequent research perspective to establish a stronger empirical evidence of possible relationships between related variables.
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