Basic Digital Education (BDE) is already planned to be integrated with the forthcoming curriculum for Austrian primary schools (6–10 years) as it was already implemented for lower secondary schools (10–14 years) in 2018. BDE includes the most essential and novel developments of Computational Thinking (CT), which are fundamentally responsible for nurturing students' problem-solving skills. Thus, evaluating teaching materials, scaffolding guidelines, and assessments is becoming increasingly important for the successful implementation of CT in Austrian classrooms. This study is a part of a longitudinal multi-cycle educational design research project aiming to explore how to foster CT and to raise the awareness, importance, and confidence of teachers and students in applying CT for everyday uses. Our paper focuses on a sub-study in which teaching units for grade 3 and 4 students (8–10 years) were designed by combining an Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook and Physical Computing with the micro:bit device. The designed learning environment consists of three units and was implemented in two classes over 3 weeks. The two classes were further split into two groups each, to ensure better support during implementation. The class teachers received upfront teacher training and conducted pre- and post-test assessments with the students. The resulting data was then analyzed to gain insights into the effects on CT skills of the young learners. Results showed that combining block-based programming and physical computing devices could become a promising approach to promote computational thinking skills in lower school grades. Furthermore, the observed direction of the designed units supports low-barrier access to increase the desired uses of CT in classrooms.
Robotics is needed as education keeps up with challenges students are facing in a technological environment. A long-term research project focuses on developing a feasible robotics-based learning environment that enables primary school teachers to introduce computer science education. This paper shows educational robotics combining storytelling to promote computational thinking through the method of Tell, Draw, and Code. The study was conducted via pre–post test, using the Beginners Computational Thinking test (BCTt), with third and fourth graders (N = 40) to determine if the integration of robotics-based storytelling activities enhances computational thinking skills. Results show that an increase in computational thinking is evident after the intervention is implemented. The approach of combining stories, texts, and literature with educational robotics seems to be a promising concept to equip students with the required skills.
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