An exploratory study of pre-service teachers’ computational thinking and programming skills

Abstract

This qualitative case study was designed to explore pre-service teachers’ computational thinking and programming skills in an educational technology course in which block-based programming was introduced in a teacher education program. 12 teacher candidates from different subject areas participated in the study. The findings show that participants’ views about computational thinking along with their programming skills evolved over the semester. They were mainly involved pattern recognition, debugging and trial-and-error to program coding tasks. They also used simple codes within a context and implemented remixing to solve complex problems. It can be concluded that well-designed educational technology courses for programming might be effective even for pre-service teachers who are novice coders. Further research and implications for teacher education curricula are also discussed in the paper.

Keywords:

• Pre-service teacher education
• programming
• computational thinking
• block-based programming
• computer science education

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Duygu Umutlu

Duygu Umutlu is an Assistant Professor of Computer Education and Educational Technology at Bogazici University, Turkey. She received her Ph.D. in Learning, Design, and Technology program at the University of Georgia, USA. Her current research interests are pre-service teachers’ learning of programming, debugging during programming, and digital adaptive scaffolding.