The goal of this master's thesis is to design a model for early programming learning that enables the development of computational thinking. We also present assessment tools that the teacher can use to analyze the development of students' computational thinking.
In the theoretical part of the master thesis, we focused on computational thinking skills. First, we analyzed how different researchers and computer science didactics define computational thinking. More extensively, we presented a model of computational thinking that includes three key dimensions. It was developed by examining Scratch workshops and activities in the online Scratch community by Brennan in Resnick. By analyzing Scratch projects, they found that students learn computer concepts: sequences, loops, events, parallelism, conditionals, operators, and data. In addition to concepts, they also presented the other two dimensions - computational thinking practice and perspective. Practice is demonstrated through the development of Scratch projects, which includes testing and debugging, reusing and remixing, being incremental and iterative, and abstracting and modularizing. The computational thinking perspective manifests through the metacognitive qualities of individuals developing projects in the Scratch community, expressing their creative ideas, feeling connected to the community, and allowing themselves to ask questions relevant to solving computational problems.
In the empirical part, we prepared activities that introduced students, from selected high school, to the basics of the Scratch 3.0 visual programming language. They had the task of creating an Escape Room in Scratch. We then analyzed their projects first quantitatively using the free online analytical tool Dr. Scratch and then qualitatively by analyzing the code of the projects. To measure understanding of the computational thinking concepts adopted, we also used the computational thinking test. This gave us insight into the stage of students’ computational thinking that they learned through project-based learning in Scratch.
We also tested the assumption that understanding of computational thinking concepts differs by age. We compared the results of the analyzed projects of the high school students aged 15 to 16 with the results of analyzed projects of students aged 10 to 12 who had attended the Scratch Escape summer workshop.
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