Developing Middle School Students’ Computational Thinking Skills Using Unplugged Computing Activities

Abstract

This study investigated the role of using unplugged computing activities on developing computational thinking (CT) skills of 6th-grade students. The unplugged computing classroom activities were based on the Bebras challenge, an international contest that aims to promote CT and informatics among school students of all ages. Participants of the study were fifty-three 6thgrade students from two public middle schools in Istanbul. The unplugged computing activities involved the tasks with three different difficulty levels covering the CT processes found to be common in CT definitions in the literature. To evaluate students' CT skills, two equivalent tests were constructed from Bebras tasks considering the same parameters (difficulty levels and CT processes). The results showed that students' post-test scores were significantly higher than their pre-test scores. There were not any significant differences between students' scores in terms of gender, and there was no interaction effect between students' CT scores and their gender.

Coding with Minecraft: The Development of Middle School Students’ Computational Thinking

“…There is considerable diversity in the literature about how CT could be developed most effectively and how this development could be assessed [32,33]. Studies designed to develop CT mainly involved, but are not limited to, the use of visual block-based programming environments [19], robotics [34,35], and unplugged computing activities [36][37][38].…”

Which way of design programming activities is more effective to promote K‐12 students' computational thinking skills? A meta‐analysis

“…Based on a comprehensive review of the current literature, the assessment types of CT skills were mostly carried out in four forms: CT scales, which can be used to evaluate students' cognition and attitudes towards CT skills and show the overall level of the learner and is suitable for large‐scale evaluation, such as CTS (Korkmaz et al, 2017); CT test, which can be used to test the individual learning level of learners and evaluate the extent to which students can transfer their CT skills to different types of problems, backgrounds and situations, such as CTT (Román‐González et al, 2018) and Bebras (Dagiene & Futschek, 2008); CT tasks, which can be used in the learning process to provide students with automatic feedback to develop and improve their CT skills, such as Dr. Scratch (Delal & Oner, 2020); and CT questions, which can be used to evaluate the CT elements verbally expressed by the subjects through questioning (Mioduser & Levy, 2010). Different CT measuring tools can also reflect different CT elements.…”

Teaching Computing without Computers: Unplugged Computing as a Pedagogical Strategy

“…Unplugged computing activities vary substantially when it comes to preparation and delivery since there are several genres of such activities that one can adopt. The types of unplugged activities vary from Magic Tricks, Storytelling, Music, Dance, Kinaesthetic Activities, Code Breakers, Contests and Puzzles amongst other genres (Bell & Vahrenhold, 2018;Curzon & McOwan, 2017;Dagienė, Futschek, & Stupurienė, 2019;Delal & Oner, 2020;Ghafoor, Brown, Rogers, & Hines, 2019;Rosamond, 2018;Sapientia, n.d.;Shelton, 2016;Waite, Maton, Curzon, & Tuttiett, 2019). Unplugged activities are also used as part of other activities such as in the algomotricity strategy where students work in groups to verbally guide a blindfolded robot through a simple path and later use a slightly modified version of Scratch to write code to guide a sprite through a maze (Lonati, Malchiodi, Monga, & Morpurgo, 2015).…”