Semiotic Traces of Computational Thinking Acquisition

Teaching Computational Thinking in initial series An analysis of the confluence among mathematics and Computer Sciences in elementary education and its implications for higher education

“…Perhaps a "revised", computer-augmented Mathematical Modeling didactic strategy will be necessary in order to accommodate the possibilities brought by CT skills and adequate software tools. Such tools must be expressive enough to model phenomena (for instance, allowing the specification of software agents, as in [16], [42]) but still keeping the syntactic structure simple enough so that beginners can rapidly produce initial results, and progressively generate more complex results as they explore the tool.…”

Cultural appropriation of computational thinking acquisition research

“…Our first study, in 2010, showed us how students expressed themselves using AgentSheets as a language [2]. The study compared verbal accounts of what participants meant to do with their games and the end result of their game design.…”

“…We partnered with a public school (School One), whose headmaster, pedagogical coordinator and an expressive number of teachers welcomed the idea of running a pioneering 8-week CTA program with volunteer middle school students. The program, using AgentSheets, was carried out as an after-class activity led by a Geography teacher (for details see [2] [3]). The highlights of this program were the following: (i) the goals and pedagogy of this activity were strongly influenced by established SGD knowledge; (ii) there was an emphasis on both the new game-based pedagogy that teachers of different subject matters (like Geography, for instance) could use to improve teaching-learning processes, and on the job market possibilities open to students who might develop an interest in Computer Science; and (iii) SGD-Br explicitly promoted the importance of ICT fluency for 21 st century citizens to participate actively in an ever-increasing number of social processes.…”

On signifying the complexity of inter-agent relations in agentsheets games and simulations

“…Besides various aspects already mentioned and illustrated in paragraphs above, the signification (choice of representation) and communication (expression of meaning and achievement intent) of relations between agents in the program structure is essential for mastering the cognitive complexity of programming tasks. This is even more important if we consider that visual renditions of agents' behavior during the game play can suggest logical relations that are actually not encoded as such in the underlying program [5]. In other words, there may be a number of different program structures that yield identical visual effects when the program is executed.…”