Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/2818314.2818325acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageswipsceConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper

Exploring Students' Computational Thinking Skills in Modeling and Simulation Projects: a Pilot Study

Published: 09 November 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Computational Thinking (CT) is gaining a lot of attention in education. We explored how to discern the occurrences of CT in the projects of 12th grade high school students in the computer science (CS) course. Within the projects, they constructed models and ran simulations of phenomena from other (STEM) disciplines. We examined which CT aspects occurred in students' activities and how to assess students' CT accomplishments. For this purpose we employed a framework based on CT characterizations by Wing [14, 15], CSTA [4] and Comer et al. [3]. We analyzed students' project documentation, survey results and interviews with individual students. The findings indicate that this framework is suitable for detection of occurrences of CT aspects in students' data. Moreover, our preliminary results suggest that the framework is useful in assessment of the quality of the students' CT performance.

References

[1]
Blikstein, P. and Wilensky, U. An Atom is Known by the Company it Keeps: Content, Representation and Pedagogy within the Epistemic Revolution of the Complexity Sciences. ( 2009).
[2]
Brennan, K. and Resnick, M. New Frameworks for Studying and Assessing the Development of Computational Thinking. In Proceedings of the 2012 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Vancouver, Canada, 2012.
[3]
Comer, D. E., Gries, D., Mulder, M. C., Tucker, A., Turner, A. J., Young, P. R. and Denning, P. J. Computing as a Discipline. Commununocations of ACM, 32, 1 ( 1989), 9--23.
[4]
CSTA Computational Thinking Task Force. Operational Definition of Computational Thinking for K--12 Education. 2013, 10/16 ( 2011).
[5]
Gouws, L., Bradshaw, K. and Wentworth, P. First Year Student Performance in a Test for Computational Thinking. In Anonymous Proceedings of the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference. (East London, South Africa, ). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2013, 271--277.
[6]
Grgurina, N., Barendsen, E., Zwaneveld, B., van de Grift, W. and Stoker, I. Computational Thinking Skills in Dutch Secondary Education. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education. ACM, 2013, 31--32.
[7]
Grgurina, N., Barendsen, E., Zwaneveld, B., van Veen, K. and Stoker, I. Computational Thinking Skills in Dutch Secondary Education: Exploring Pedagogical Content Knowledge. In Proceedings of the 14th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research. ACM, 2014, 173--174.
[8]
Grgurina, N., Barendsen, E., Zwaneveld, B., van Veen, K. and Stoker, I. Computational Thinking Skills in Dutch Secondary Education: Exploring Teacher's Perspective. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education. ACM, 2014, 124--125.
[9]
Grover, S. Robotics and Engineering for Middle and High School Students to Develop Computational Thinking. In annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA, 2011.
[10]
Linn, M. C. The Cognitive Consequences of Programming Instruction in Classrooms. Educational Researcher, 14, 5 (1985), 14--29.
[11]
Meerbaum-Salant, O., Armoni, M. and Ben-Ari, M. Learning Computer Science Concepts with Scratch. Computer Science Education, 23, 3 (2013), 239--264.
[12]
Taub, R., Armoni, M. and Ben-Ari, M. M. Abstraction as a Bridging Concept Between Computer Science and Physics. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education. ACM, 2014, 16--19.
[13]
Werner, L., Denner, J., Campe, S. and Kawamoto, D. C. The Fairy Performance Assessment: Measuring Computational Thinking in Middle School. In Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education. (Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, ). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2012, 215--220.
[14]
Wing, J. M. Computational Thinking and Thinking about Computing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 366, 1881 (2008), 3717.
[15]
Wing, J. M. Computational Thinking. Communications of ACM, 49, 3 (2006), 33--35.

Cited By

View all
  • (2020)Educational Practices in Computational Thinking: Assessment, Pedagogical Aspects, Limits, and Possibilities: A Systematic Mapping StudyComputer Supported Education10.1007/978-3-030-58459-7_21(442-466)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2020
  • (2019)A double dissociative study into the effectiveness of computational thinkingEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-019-09991-325:2(1181-1192)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
  • (2018)Assessment of modeling and simulation in secondary computing science educationProceedings of the 13th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education10.1145/3265757.3265764(1-10)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2018
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
WiPSCE '15: Proceedings of the Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education
November 2015
149 pages
ISBN:9781450337533
DOI:10.1145/2818314
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]

In-Cooperation

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 November 2015

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Computational thinking
  2. computer science education
  3. modeling
  4. simulations
  5. students' learning

Qualifiers

  • Short-paper
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

WiPSCE '15

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 104 of 279 submissions, 37%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)4
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 19 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2020)Educational Practices in Computational Thinking: Assessment, Pedagogical Aspects, Limits, and Possibilities: A Systematic Mapping StudyComputer Supported Education10.1007/978-3-030-58459-7_21(442-466)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2020
  • (2019)A double dissociative study into the effectiveness of computational thinkingEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-019-09991-325:2(1181-1192)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
  • (2018)Assessment of modeling and simulation in secondary computing science educationProceedings of the 13th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education10.1145/3265757.3265764(1-10)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2018
  • (2018)Impact of Teaching Approaches to Computational Thinking on High School Students: A Systematic Mapping2018 IEEE 18th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT)10.1109/ICALT.2018.00072(285-289)Online publication date: Jul-2018
  • (2018)The Second Decade of Informatics in Dutch Secondary EducationInformatics in Schools. Fundamentals of Computer Science and Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-02750-6_21(271-282)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
  • (2017)SMart-Learning: State Machine Simulators for Developing Thinking Skills2017 IEEE 17th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT)10.1109/ICALT.2017.73(81-83)Online publication date: Jul-2017
  • (2017)Investigating Informatics Teachers’ Initial Pedagogical Content Knowledge on Modeling and SimulationInformatics in Schools: Focus on Learning Programming10.1007/978-3-319-71483-7_6(65-76)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2017
  • (2016)Defining and Observing Modeling and Simulation in InformaticsInformatics in Schools: Improvement of Informatics Knowledge and Perception10.1007/978-3-319-46747-4_11(130-141)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2016

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media