Preparing Pre-service Teachers to Promote Computational Thinking in School Classrooms

Abstract

Computational thinking is an essential skill for the twenty-first century. Teacher education departments, however, do not currently have the knowledge to promote computational thinking in their programs. The question, then, becomes how to include the teaching of computational thinking in teacher education courses. The present study directly addresses this issue. In particular, the study proposes the use of scaffolded programming scripts as one method for teaching computational thinking in pre-service teacher education. In this study, scaffolded programming scripts were used in the context of educational robotics activities for the teaching of a science lesson on gears. The results report effects on pre-service teachers’ computational thinking, knowledge about gears and how they work, and self-reported efficacy to teach with educational robotics. The authors discuss implications and future research directions.