{"title":"Editorial","authors":"Brian Dorn, Jan Vahrenhold","doi":"10.1080/08993408.2022.2148962","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The five articles presented in this issue explore different facets of computational thinking for learners from kindergarten through university. The first article in this issue, authored by de Ruiter and Bers, introduces a new instrument called the Coding Stages Assessment (CSA) and describes their work to establish its reliability and validity. The CSA is an open question assessment leveraging ScratchJr and prompts that are a mixture of verbal reasoning about code examples and coding completion tasks. Coding mastery is rated using the CSA along five theoretical stages: emergent, coding and decoding, fluency, new knowledge, and purposefulness. The current version of the instrument was used in a field test of 118 children between five and eight years old, and validity evidence is presented using classical test theory and item response theory. A key contribution of this work is that it addresses a critical lack of instruments for measuring coding knowledge gains among pre-literate primary school children. Hogenboom, Hermans, and van der Maas continue our focus on assessment instruments for primary school children in the second article of the issue. Their work introduces the web-based Computerized Adaptive Programming Concepts Test (CAPCT) built using the Math Garden system. The CAPCT is made up of over 4400 closed form questions which are dynamically presented to learners based on their prior responses. The authors analyze over 14 million responses from 93,341 Dutch primary school children and show that 75% of the response variance is explainable by item difficulty. This work is another promising approach to accurately measuring the development of programming knowledge among our youngest learners. The authors of the third article in this issue Tabletop games designed to promote computational thinking, Poole, Clarke-Midura, Rasmussen, Shehzad, and Lee turn our attention from the assessment of Computational Thinking to instructional means. In their analysis of tabletop games designed to foster concepts in Computational Thinking, they study code building, code execution, and puzzle games as well as combinations thereof. Their taxonomy and the resulting classification of 24 tabletop games provides researchers and educators with valuable input regarding which game to use with which group of learners to foster a given Computational Thinking construct. Vice versa, the authors derive a set of guidelines for the creation of tabletop games in this domain and suggest further directions for instruction and research. The fourth article in this issue, Experiential serious-game design for development of knowledge of object-oriented programming and computational thinking skills, also focuses on educational gaming. Authors Akkaya and Akpinar study the effects of a serious gaming approach to teaching concepts in object-oriented programming, Computational Thinking, and motivation in general. Using the framing of Experiential Learning, they tasked undergraduate students with engaging in a so-called serious game; this game had been designed by the authors incorporating both the Experiential Learning model and COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION 2022, VOL. 32, NO. 4, 385–387 https://doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2022.2148962","PeriodicalId":45844,"journal":{"name":"Computer Science Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Computer Science Education","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2022.2148962","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The five articles presented in this issue explore different facets of computational thinking for learners from kindergarten through university. The first article in this issue, authored by de Ruiter and Bers, introduces a new instrument called the Coding Stages Assessment (CSA) and describes their work to establish its reliability and validity. The CSA is an open question assessment leveraging ScratchJr and prompts that are a mixture of verbal reasoning about code examples and coding completion tasks. Coding mastery is rated using the CSA along five theoretical stages: emergent, coding and decoding, fluency, new knowledge, and purposefulness. The current version of the instrument was used in a field test of 118 children between five and eight years old, and validity evidence is presented using classical test theory and item response theory. A key contribution of this work is that it addresses a critical lack of instruments for measuring coding knowledge gains among pre-literate primary school children. Hogenboom, Hermans, and van der Maas continue our focus on assessment instruments for primary school children in the second article of the issue. Their work introduces the web-based Computerized Adaptive Programming Concepts Test (CAPCT) built using the Math Garden system. The CAPCT is made up of over 4400 closed form questions which are dynamically presented to learners based on their prior responses. The authors analyze over 14 million responses from 93,341 Dutch primary school children and show that 75% of the response variance is explainable by item difficulty. This work is another promising approach to accurately measuring the development of programming knowledge among our youngest learners. The authors of the third article in this issue Tabletop games designed to promote computational thinking, Poole, Clarke-Midura, Rasmussen, Shehzad, and Lee turn our attention from the assessment of Computational Thinking to instructional means. In their analysis of tabletop games designed to foster concepts in Computational Thinking, they study code building, code execution, and puzzle games as well as combinations thereof. Their taxonomy and the resulting classification of 24 tabletop games provides researchers and educators with valuable input regarding which game to use with which group of learners to foster a given Computational Thinking construct. Vice versa, the authors derive a set of guidelines for the creation of tabletop games in this domain and suggest further directions for instruction and research. The fourth article in this issue, Experiential serious-game design for development of knowledge of object-oriented programming and computational thinking skills, also focuses on educational gaming. Authors Akkaya and Akpinar study the effects of a serious gaming approach to teaching concepts in object-oriented programming, Computational Thinking, and motivation in general. Using the framing of Experiential Learning, they tasked undergraduate students with engaging in a so-called serious game; this game had been designed by the authors incorporating both the Experiential Learning model and COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION 2022, VOL. 32, NO. 4, 385–387 https://doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2022.2148962
本期发表的五篇文章探讨了从幼儿园到大学学习者计算思维的不同方面。本期的第一篇文章由de Ruiter和Bers撰写,介绍了一种名为编码阶段评估(CSA)的新工具,并描述了他们为建立其可靠性和有效性所做的工作。CSA是一个开放式问题评估,利用ScratchJr和提示,混合了对代码示例和代码完成任务的口头推理。编码熟练程度根据CSA分为五个理论阶段:涌现、编码和解码、流利性、新知识和目的性。该工具的当前版本用于118名5至8岁儿童的现场测试,并使用经典测试理论和项目反应理论提供了有效性证据。这项工作的一个关键贡献是,它解决了在识字前的小学儿童中严重缺乏衡量编码知识收益的工具的问题。Hogenboom、Hermans和van der Maas在本期的第二篇文章中继续关注小学儿童的评估工具。他们的工作介绍了使用数学花园系统构建的基于网络的计算机自适应编程概念测试(CAPCT)。CAPCT由4400多个封闭式问题组成,这些问题根据学习者先前的回答动态呈现给他们。作者分析了93341名荷兰小学生的1400多万份回复,发现75%的回复差异可以通过项目难度来解释。这项工作是另一种很有前途的方法,可以准确衡量我们最年轻的学习者的编程知识发展。本期第三篇文章的作者Poole、Clarke Midura、Rasmussen、Shehzad和Lee将我们的注意力从计算思维的评估转向了教学手段。在分析旨在培养计算思维概念的桌面游戏时,他们研究了代码构建、代码执行、益智游戏及其组合。他们的分类法和由此产生的24款桌面游戏的分类为研究人员和教育工作者提供了宝贵的意见,让他们了解与哪组学习者一起使用哪款游戏来培养给定的计算思维结构。反之亦然,作者推导了一套在该领域创建桌面游戏的指南,并提出了进一步的指导和研究方向。本期的第四篇文章,体验式严肃游戏设计,旨在开发面向对象编程和计算思维技能的知识,也侧重于教育游戏。作者Akkaya和Akpinar研究了严肃的游戏方法对面向对象编程、计算思维和一般动机概念教学的影响。利用体验式学习的框架,他们让本科生参与所谓的严肃游戏;该游戏由作者设计,结合了体验式学习模式和2022年计算机科学教育,第32卷,第4期,385-387https://doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2022.2148962
期刊介绍:
Computer Science Education publishes high-quality papers with a specific focus on teaching and learning within the computing discipline. The journal seeks novel contributions that are accessible and of interest to researchers and practitioners alike. We invite work with learners of all ages and across both classroom and out-of-classroom learning contexts.