Since its introduction by Papert[1] and its application to the educational field by Wing[2], computational thinking has been experiencing a growing development in recent years in all levels of compulsory education and also in the informal...
moreSince its introduction by Papert[1] and its application to the educational field by Wing[2], computational thinking has been experiencing a growing development in recent years in all levels of compulsory education and also in the informal field. Undoubtedly, computational thinking helps individuals to better cope with learning challenges and even with everyday life challenges themselves; in addition, it is motivating for young people, and because of that, it is frequently offered as a common activity outside school or inside the curriculum. In Catalonia, different governmental initiatives consider the inclusion of programming and robotics in the ordinary classroom as a result of that; in fact, it is considered positive to generalize the computational thinking in the compulsory education system, because of its many possibilities and its many potentialities. However, nowadays the Faculties of Education do not form teachers prepared to teach computational thinking to their future students, which may run the risk of not having professionals prepared enough in this regard. Because of this, the PECOFIM project is investigating the most effective ways to train future teachers in computational thinking. As a first part of this project, a descriptive analysis of the initial level of knowledge and expectations on computational thinking as a training strategy for the pre-service teachers of the two participating universities has been carried out, and preliminary data offer us an interesting view on the status quo in this regard. Although the informants generally offer a precise definition of computational thinking, the preconception we detect in them is always closely linked to the experiences they have had in this respect and, therefore, it is related to robotics or programming, in an often quite restrictive vision. Students show a high level of expectations about the educational possibilities of computational thinking in Primary Education, although their expectations are excessively linked to the instrumental domains related to programming itself and not to its incidence in the development of the other literacies and abilities. In addition, they are able to recognize in general terms which are the most relevant elements of the didactic strategies that allow students to develop it. However, even those who have been trained in robotics feel unprepared to act as teachers in computational thinking. As a last positive, it is important to emphasize that in any case the interest of the pre-service teachers to train in computational thinking is high. Several studies and reports have pointed out that Computational Thinking improves some very specific problem solving skills, such as the ability to think logically. On their own, Brennan and Resnick [3] point out three dimensions of Computational Thinking, which are computational concepts (concepts that designers use when programming, such as sequences, events, loops, parallelism, etc.), computational practices (that designers develop when they program, such as incremental and iterative development, trial and error, abstraction, modularization, etc.) and finally computational perspectives (that is, perspectives that designers form about their surroundings and about themselves, such as learning to express, connecting, questioning, etc.). As a natural consequence of this, there are many initiatives that attempt to exploit all these potentialities within the educational field. In fact, Computational Thinking allows to improve the fun and the motivation when exploring the learning of very diverse concepts, not only mathematical [4]. Hence it is useful for the general population, not only for computer scientists [2] and so it is considered a basic and transversal literacy for citizenship [5].
