Computational thinking in the primary classroom : a case study about digital age skills for children

Abstract

Wing (2010), describes computational thinking as the psychological activity in “formulating a problem to admit a computational solution”. She makes use of the phrase “computational thinking” as a replacement for the term “thinking like a computer scientist.” The purpose of this research was to guide students to develop their problem solving skills by integrating computational thinking in their primary school curriculum. For this study, a qualitative data research approach was chosen. A six week activity club was developed in order to introduce computational thinking to twenty year 5 students. Our qualitative case study focused on three different but significant methodologies; observations and field notes, audio recording and the pre-post- test. The findings indicated that this research was effective, as the post test showed better results than in the pre-test. This shows that the students developed skills in the four main areas of computational thinking. A resource pack for teachers was developed, in order to guide them in how to integrate better these techniques and incorporate them in their lessons.