Nurturing secondary school student computational thinking through educational robotics

Abstract

Digital literacy is becoming a key factor in today’s digital revolution age. Computational Thinking (CT) is a new digital literacy that is gradually being introduced in the school curriculum due to its applicability in the daily problem-solving process. Educational Robotics (ER) has been increasingly used as a pedagogical tool to attract students to learn computer programming, and when integrated with CT, they can be used to develop high order thinking skills. However, intertwining between CT and ER remains a challenge for teachers. This paper describes a method to expose secondary school children to CT concepts and skills through ER learning activities. The method integrates the four CT core concepts, which are problem analysis and algorithm; abstraction; pattern recognition; and decomposition, in a two days’ ER workshop implementation. The result of the study shows that the method of integrating CT with ER has the potential to nurture students’ CT and programming skills. This study shows a statistically significant increase in the students' understanding of the two CT concepts which are pattern recognition and decomposition concepts.