Pia Niemelä
Petri Ihantola
ABSTRACT
In the 21st century, the skills of computational thinking complement those of traditional math teaching. In order to gain the knowledge required to teach these skills, a cohort of math teachers participated in an in-service training scheme conducted as a massive open online course (MOOC). This paper analyses the success of this training scheme and uses the results of the study to focus on the skills of computational thinking, and to explore how math teachers expect to integrate computing into the K-12 math syllabus. The coursework and feedback from the MOOC course indicate that they readily associate computational thinking with problem solving in math. In addition, some of the teachers are inspired by the new opportunities to be creative in their teaching. However, the set of programming concepts they refer to in their essays is insubstantial and unfocused, so these concepts are consolidated here to form a hypothetical learning trajectory for computational thinking.
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Index Terms
- Computational thinking as an emergent learning trajectory of mathematics
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