Developing middle school students’ computational thinking skills using unplugged computing activities

Abstract

This study investigated the role of unplugged computing activities on developing computational thinking (CT) skills of 6th grade students. The unplugged computing classroom activities were based on Bebras challenges. Bebras, an international organization, aims to promote informatics and CT among school students. Participants of the study were 6th grade (n=24 female and n=29 male) students from two public middle schools in Istanbul. The activities in the study were divided into three groups as “easy”, “medium” and “difficult” according to the difficulty levels as defined in the Bebras competition, which were selected so that each group involved four components of CT skills found to be common in CT definitions in the literature -- abstraction, decomposition, algorithmic thinking, and generalization. To evaluate students’ CT skills, two equivalent tests were prepared. Questions in these tests were also selected from Bebras and translated into Turkish. Also, questions in the tests have three difficulty levels and covers the four major CT skills as in the activities. These tests were used as a pre-test and post-test, and their results were compared to assess students’ CT skill development. The CT Scale (Korkmaz et al., 2016) was also given to the participants at the end of the instruction. The results of the study showed that students’ post-test scores were significantly higher than pre-test scores. However, there was not any significant differences between students’ scores in terms of gender, and there was no interaction effect between students’ scores and their gender. In terms of the CT Scale results, there was no significant difference between male and female students’ self-evaluation of CT skill