Post-Doctoral Research

Period: 01/06/2020 → 01/05/2023

DESIGNS FOR LEARNING COMPUTATIONAL THINKING WITH COMPUTATIONAL THINGS IN PRIMARY SCHOOL.

Status: In progress

Period: 01/June/2020 → 31/May/2023

Subject words: Computational Literacy, Computational Thinking, Computer science, Materiality, Situated knowledge, Public school

The work is part of a larger nationally funded project called: “Designing for situated computational thinking with computational things”, which over four years, will examine how algorithmic thinking, critical understanding, and creative development can play a role in everyday life from kindergarten to university. In the project, I develop and test didactic designs that support the situated learning of computational thinking and – Literacy when pupils are using tangible things that are both analogue and digitally programmable. Through this, focal points for a didactics for computational thinking are formulated.

Concretely, the empirical part is carried out as design experiments in L1 teaching at the middle level (4th-6th grade) in the primary school. In this perspective, Computational Literacy must be seen as a way in which pupils can investigate, create and relate to phenomena that generally involve computations.

Further Computational Thinking skills and methods such as:

• Decomposition, being able to break down and divide a problem into smaller manageable parts.
  
• Pattern recognition, seeing connections, similarities and differences.
  
• Abstraction and generalizations, being able to derive the most important elements of a challenge and its solution, as well as generalize this across other situations and issues.
  
• Algorithmic thinking and design, being able to think logically and sequentially and design for such workflows.
  

The project differs from similar research within Computational Thinking and technology understanding in several ways:
Firstly, by focusing on the pupils’ imagination and creativity.
Secondly, by having a particular focus on physical, tangible things.
Thirdly, in the project, I am curious about how the teaching within content areas of L1 is transformed when there is a focus on inquiry and experimental-based teaching, where the starting point is not “wicked and complex” problems from a societal perspective, but instead is based on the inner life of the pupils and content areas within the subject such as literature teaching, genre reading and text production (in a broad sense).