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Bringing computational thinking to teachers' training: a workshop review

Published: 18 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In recent years, several visual programming languages and tools are emerging, which allow young students to easily program applications. Particularly, the block-based language used by Scratch has been the standard in most school initiatives to introduce Computational thinking (CT) in courses unrelated to computing. However, CT competences are not specifically included in the curricula of many Higher Education degrees that future teachers of Primary and Secondary Education have to complete. This paper describes a workshop for teachers' training on CT. It is based on the block-based common language of Scratch, but focused on enhancing teachers' skills to develop mobile applications with a tool based on the MIT's AppInventor. This workshop provided some insights on the capabilities of future teachers in the use of programming tools1.

References

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Tedre, M., & Denning, P. J. (2016). The long quest for computational thinking. In Proc. of the 16th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research, Koli, Finland, pp. 120--129.
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García-Peñalvo, F. J. (2016). What Computational Thinking Is. Journal of Information Technology Research, 9(3), 5--8.
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Papert, S., & Solomon, C. (1971). Twenty things to do with a computer, Report No. AIM-248, MIT, CSAIL
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Moreno-León, J., Robles, G., & Román-González, M. (2015). Dr. Scratch: Automatic analysis of scratch projects to assess and foster computational thinking. RED. Revista de Educación a Distancia, 46(10).
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Leask, M. & Pachler, N. (2014). Learning to Teach Using ICT in the Secondary School. A companion to school experience, 3rd ed., Routledge.
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García-Peñalvo, F. J. (2016). A brief introduction to TACCLE 3 -- Coding European Project. In F. J. García-Peñalvo & J. A. Mendes (Eds.), Proc. of 16th Int. Symposium on Computers in Education (SIIE), Sep 13-15, Salamanca, Spain, pp. 1--4.
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García-Peñalvo, F. J., Rees, A. M., Hughes, J., Jormanainen, I., Toivonen, T., & Vermeersch, J. (2016). A survey of resources for introducing coding into schools. In F. J. García-Peñalvo (Ed.), Proc. of the 4th Int. Conf. on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality (TEEM), Nov 2-4, Salamanca, Spain, pp. 19--26.
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García-Peñalvo, F. J., Llorens Largo, F., Molero Prieto, X., & Vendrell Vidal, E. (2017). Introducción a la sección especial: Educación en Informática sub 18. ReVisión, 10(2), pp. 13--18.
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Lye, S. Y. & Koh, J. H. L. (2014). Review on teaching and learning of computational thinking through programming: What is next for K-12? Computers in Human Behavior, 41(12), pp. 51--61.
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Blum, L., & Cortina, T. J. (2007). CS4HS: An outreach program for high school CS teachers. SIGCSE Bulletin, 39(1), pp. 19--23.
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Liu, J., Lin, C.-H., Hasson, E. P., & Barnett, Z. D. (2011). Introducing computer science to K-12 through a summer computing workshop for teachers, Proc. of the 42nd ACM SIGCSE, Mar 9-12, 2011, Dallas, TX, USA, pp. 389--394.
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Bean, N., Weese, J., Feldhausen, R., & Bell, R. S. (2015). Starting from Scratch Developing a Pre-Service Teacher Training Program in Computational Thinking. IEEE FIE Conference, Oct 21-24, Camino Real El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA, pp. 1307--1314.
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TEEM 2017: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality
October 2017
723 pages
ISBN:9781450353861
DOI:10.1145/3144826
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • University of Salamanca: University of Salamanca

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 October 2017

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Author Tags

  1. Computational thinking
  2. mobile programming
  3. visual programming languages

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  • Research-article
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  • Refereed limited

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TEEM 2017

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TEEM 2017 Paper Acceptance Rate 84 of 109 submissions, 77%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 496 of 705 submissions, 70%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Enhancing Mathematization in Physics Education by Digital ToolsPhysics Education Today10.1007/978-3-031-48667-8_3(35-53)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2024
  • (2023)Prototype of a Recommendation Model with Artificial Intelligence for Computational Thinking Improvement of Secondary Education StudentsComputers10.3390/computers1206011312:6(113)Online publication date: 26-May-2023
  • (2023)Teacher Education to Integrate Computational Thinking into Elementary Science: A Design-Based Research StudyACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/361811523:4(1-36)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2023
  • (2022)Novel Scratch Programming Blocks for Web ScrapingElectronics10.3390/electronics1116258411:16(2584)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2022
  • (2022)Introduction to Computational Thinking with Scratch for Teacher Training for Spanish Primary School Teachers in MathematicsEducation Sciences10.3390/educsci1212089912:12(899)Online publication date: 8-Dec-2022
  • (2022)Game Design, Gender and Personalities in Programming EducationFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2022.8249954Online publication date: 8-Feb-2022
  • (2022)Computational thinking integration in elementary teachers' science lesson plansComputational Thinking in PreK-510.1145/3507951.3519283(11-18)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2022
  • (2021)A Guided Scratch Visual Execution Environment to Introduce Programming Concepts to CS1 StudentsInformation10.3390/info1209037812:9(378)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2021
  • (2021)Examining theoretical and pedagogical foundations of computational thinking in the context of higher education2021 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE49875.2021.9637405(1-8)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2021
  • (2020)Computational Thinking Interventions in Higher EducationProceedings of the 20th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3428029.3428055(1-10)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2020
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