Exploring the computational thinking effects in pre-university education

摘要

Several countries have usually adopted several priorities for developing ICT competences from kindergarten to secondary education. Most of them are focused on the development of key competences and/or coding skills. Although coding may be very attractive for young students and a very good practice or experience, it could be more interesting to develop students' logical thinking skills and problem-solving skills throughout programming approaches or computational thinking. This is a very exciting challenge with lots of possibilities regarding coding, robots, mobiles devices, Arduino-based application, game based learning and so on. Thus, it is very important to explore the effect that these experiences have been taking into the pre-university students, both at primary and secondary education, with a special focus on the computational thinking as one of the components inside the toolbox to develop a reflexive and critical education in order to help children to solve problems using the technology with which they will live daily. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.