The effect of visualization tools on secondary students’ problem solving and computational thinking skill

Abstract

Education has gone through numerous transformation over the years and with the 21st century learning becoming more prominent, improving students’ problem solving and computational skills has become more crucial. This research is aiming to investigate the effect of various visualization tools on secondary school students’ problem solving and computational skills. The effect of different visualization tools either, with or without technology, is very important in to enable students to improve their thinking abilities and be prepared to venture into the real world. This research uses qualitative design where 23 students from an international school in Johor Bahru were administered pre-test, post-test and computational thinking test. They were involved in a five weeks intervention process. The findings of the research shows that, there are strong relationship between visualization and students’ problem solving. There is significant differences in students problem solving and computational thinking skills after being introduced with different visualization tools. Students have shown improvements in all the problem solving phases as well as all the computational thinking components. Therefore, this research has shown that visualization tools are able to improve students’ problem solving and computational thinking skills and it should be implemented in the mathematics classroom.