Enhancing Computational Thinking Capability of Preschool Children by Game-based Smart Toys

Abstract

Computational thinking has become an important issue in the field of education. Because preschool and kindergarten learners are capable of exercising their cognitive abilities to resolve basic computational logic, this demographic has raised significant interest in studying their learning intentions and behaviors. However, prior research fails to examine the effects of teaching computational logic to kindergarten children. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the influences of teaching approaches in guiding preschool children to learn computational logic and programming concepts to enhance their problem-solving skills as well as computational thinking abilities. A novel teaching framework is designed to develop the learner’s cognitive abilities, which adopts the smart toy game-based learning approach along with a tangible user interface (TUI) to enhance children’s learning performance and interests. The proposed teaching approach integrates the game-based learning concepts into the TUI system, where the learning processes allow the learners to effectively practice the conceptual knowledge and efficiently advance their problem-solving skills. The results suggest using the developed game-based TUI system can increase preschool children’s learning behaviors as well as enhance their learning interests and computational thinking abilities.