Developing computational thinking collaboratively: the nexus of computational practices within small groups

ABSTRACT

Background and Context

Computational thinking (CT) is a critical part of computing education in middle school. The existing practices of collaboration and collaborative design activities at this education level pairs well with CT practices, but this interaction has previously been under-explored in the existing literature.

Objective

In this study, we investigate whether students can learn CT through collaborative design activities and what patterns emerge over time and across instructional phases.

Method

We coded 6.3 hours of video observations for CT practices to create visualizations of 10-second segments of middle school students programming together. We use these visualizations to unpack nuances regarding how students demonstrate CT practices. Additionally, we provide three vignettes to highlight the interactions between students within and across the three instructional phases.

Findings

The findings suggest that middle school students can learn CT concepts and practices through collaborative design activities. The results demonstrate the patterns of CT practices and detail the transitions between each CT practice over time within a small group.

Implications

This study applies novel analysis techniques on student interaction data to examine CT through collaborative design. By bridging a CT framework with collaborative design activities, this study enhances the understanding of CT in collaborating, learning, and creating computing project-based designs.

KEYWORDS:

• Computational thinking
• collaborative design
• computational practices and concepts
• middle school
• collaboration

Acknowledgments

This work is supported in part by the Center of Excellence for Women and Technology at Indiana University Bloomington, the National Science Foundation through Grant #1923136, and by the United States Department of Education through Grant #U411C190092. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the United States Department of Education. We thank Dr. Fernando Rodriguez (University of California, Irvine) for providing data visualization inputs on Figure 6.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [1923136]; United States Department of Education [U411C190092].