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 the 4C instructional design model. The study showed significant learning gains for both the group with no prior programming experience and the group with previous (procedural) programming experience. The authors conclude that a carefully designed serious game indeed can be used for instruction even on undergraduate level.
The final article in this issue, Computational thinking in the Ethiopian secondary school ICT curriculum, presents the results of a thematic analysis of curricular documents, textbooks, and teaching guidelines used in Ethiopia. This case study by Kassa and Mekonnen takes a detailed look at which Computational Thinking concepts can be found in such a curriculum and its corresponding textbooks. Their analysis covers a variety of conceptualizations of Computational Thinking that can be found in the literature as well as a number of tools used or recommended in teaching guidelines. While the data implies that Computational Thinking indeed is covered in the Ethiopian ICT curriculum, the authors point out that the coverage of Computational Thinking concepts cannot be considered as systematic. With their analyses and recommendations, the authors thus contribute to an ongoing debate about the practical implications of prioritizing the teaching of Information and Communication Technologies, of Computational Thinking, or of Computer Science at the K-12 level.
Journal Updates
Following the very positive reaction to the special issue on Registered Report Replication studies (CSE 32(3)), we are pleased to announce that Computer Science Education now accepts registered reports. Our webpage contains more details about the concept and the submission process of such reports and we are happy to answer any inquiries. The three guest editors of this special issue have agreed to join the editorial board of Computer Science Education to share their expertise. We are grateful for this and welcome our three new associate editors:
is a Research Fellow at King’s College London in the UK. He works on researching and developing programming tools aimed at novices, including BlueJ, Greenfoot and the new Strype tool. He also administers the Blackbox data collection project which shares novice programming activity data with other researchers. His research interests include the design and evaluation of programming education tools, interfaces and languages.
is a Senior Research Associate in the Learning and Technology program at WestEd in the United States. Her research focuses on understanding and documenting the knowledge K-12 educators develop around how to teach computing. She supports school districts, universities, and other organizations in using research to design and implement professional learning programs for teachers new to computing. She also conducts external program evaluations of informal computing programs for secondary students and computing degrees for tertiary students studying other disciplines.
is a Professor at the Institute for Media and School at the Schwyz University of Teacher Education in Switzerland. Her research focuses on computer science education and media education of children and pre-service teachers. She also develops and teaches courses on research & development and educational technology in the university’s master’s degree program “Media and Computer Science Education”.
Also, we are delighted to welcome another new member of our editorial board:
is a Professor, Teaching Stream at the University of Toronto in Canada where she focuses on undergraduate education in computer science. She has run outreach programs for middle school and high school students to encourage them to consider careers in computing and training workshops for high school computing teachers. She has previously served on the ACM SIGCSE board, the ITiCSE Steering committee, and the ACM Education Board. Her research interests are in the empirical evaluation of interventions for improving teaching undergraduate computer science.
At the same time, we are sorry to say farewell to one of our associate editors:
has served as an associate editor of Computer Science Education since 2018. It has been our sincere pleasure to benefit from his wealth of knowledge, his deep commitment to growing the field of computing education research, and his infectious laughter. We are excited to see Mark’s continued contributions to interdisciplinary computing education as the inaugural Director of the Program in Computing for the Arts and Sciences at the University of Michigan. Thank you for your service over the last four years to CSE and best wishes on your new adventure!
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).