Cultivating computational thinking in early years through board games. The Cthink.it approach

Abstract

Computational Thinking (CT) was brought up originally in the 1950s as the notion of using structured or algorithmic thinking. It refers to a specific set of mental skills used to formulate solutions to problems by converting given inputs to produce appropriate outputs while following detailed algorithms to perform this process. CT is broadly defined as a combination of thinking processes which include abstraction, algorithm design, decomposition, sequencing, pattern recognition and data representation. The prominence of CT in education has been steadily increasing. Lately, the corresponding research is focusing also on early years (starting from the age of 4). Towards this direction and in combination with the blooming of Game-based and gamified learning approaches, this paper discusses the design of a board game addressed to children 4–8 years old, for cultivating CT skills. A detailed roadmap on the design of the game, including a systematic literature review is presented in this paper.