The use of engineering model‐building activities to elicit computational thinking: A design‐based research study

Abstract

Background Computation and computational thinking are of great interest to both engineering research and teaching communities. Effective learning environments are needed to incorporate computational thinking within the engineering disciplines. Design‐based research is uniquely positioned to address this need for designing effective learning environments. Purpose This design‐based research study characterizes the different ways in which students used computational thinking when building computational models. The design of the model‐building activities was grounded in productive failure and model‐eliciting activities. Design The design‐based research study implemented the computational modeling activities within an engineering capstone course. The research question was: What types of computational thinking outcomes emerge when engineering students build computational models? Thematic analysis was applied to individual student artifacts to identify key computational thinking outcomes that were elicited as a result of the intervention. Results Throughout the building of the model, students demonstrated the use of computational thinking outcomes, mainly abstraction, algorithmic thinking, evaluation, generalization, and decomposition. However, the diversity and density of use for each outcome were different and unique. Conclusions This study shows how building computational models, when guided by current educational theories, can allow for students to practice the use of computational thinking and for educators to incorporate these key practices into their engineering classrooms.

Research Status in Computational Thinking in STEM Education

“…First, educational policy must be amended to cater to this need and secondly, overcoming infrastructure hurdles, such as the need for teacher resources and teacher education and training. Some emphasis is placed on teacher education regarding the development of CT in STEM related fields [27,29,31,34,36,45,48].…”

“…This may be related to the duration of the training or intervention, student interest, or the quality of the course. While most studies examined the effect of the intervention on CT, Research Status in Computational Thinking in STEM Education DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104472 there were three studies [27,38,50] that used CT as part of the teaching strategy to determine its effect of students' performance in the related subjects, such as engineering, science, and chemistry. In all three case cases, the outcome was positive.…”

The role of frameworks in engineering education research

“…Analytical frameworks can be combined with a set of methodological, theoretical, and conceptual frameworks. An example that described and applied an analytical framework is the work of Lyon and Magana (2021). In their study, these researchers used design-based research as the methodology, model-based reasoning as their theoretical approach, and computational thinking as their conceptual framework.…”

Combining hands‐on and virtual experiments for enhancing fluid mechanics teaching: A design‐based research study

“…In recent years flipped classroom practices are increasingly used in FM courses, mostly in developed economies [34,40,66,82,98,99], which allowed the instructor to cover more course topics and the students to perform similarly or better than their counterparts in the traditional instruction [50,65]. These studies also suggest that flipped classroom increases lecturer-students interaction, encourages collaborative learning, and facilitates long-term retention [21,78].…”