The language and concepts used by curriculum designers are not always interpreted by children as designers intended. This can be problematic when researchers use self-reported survey instruments in concert with curricula, which often rely on the implicit belief that students' understanding aligns with their own. We report on our refinement of a…

Computational thinking (CT) is considered to be a critical problem-solving toolkit in the development of every student in the digital twenty-first century. Thus, it is believed that the integration of deeper learning in CT education is an approach to help students transfer their CT skills beyond the classroom. Few literature reviews have mapped…

Educational escape rooms aims to motivate students, to strengthen knowledge and evaluate learning. Pre-service teachers enrolled in "Computer Science and Digital Competency" course shows lack of motivation and difficulties to realise its usefulness in everyday practice, becoming an ideal context to apply this strategy. 157 students…

All primary school children in England are required to write computer programs and learn about computational thinking. There are moves in other countries to this effect such as the U.S. K-12 Computer Science Framework (CSF) for development. Debates on how to program and what constitutes computational thinking are ongoing. Here we report on a study…

In an increasingly digital world, the elementary school students of today who learn to program will be positioned to re-imagine and build the future. As educators, it is essential to consider how such an important skill is made accessible for a diverse range of students, including those diagnosed with learning disabilities. In this article, the…

Computational thinking (CT) is a fundamental skill for students, and assessment is a critical factor in education. However, there is a lack of effective approaches to CT assessment. Therefore, we designed the Three-Dimensional Integrated Assessment (TDIA) framework in this article. The TDIA has two aims: one was to integrate three dimensions…

The perspective that computing and computational thinking (CT) are necessary competencies for the 21st century is increasingly pervasive. Computational concepts and methods--problem solving, designing systems, refining the steps in a process, and tinkering toward creative solutions--are relevant in nearly every discipline, profession, and…

We developed the Draw-A-Computer-Scientist-Test (DACST) to better understand elementary school students' conceptions of computer scientists and the nature of their work. By understanding how young children perceive computer scientists, we can broaden their ideas about the activities and images of computer scientists. We administered the DACST to…

This dissertation conducted a science classroom intervention using two instructional approaches, computational modeling and paper-based pictorial modeling, in the context of food webs. A series of research papers were written on the impact of the intervention on students' attitudes and learning, and on teachers via professional development and…

The lack of diversity in the technology workforce in the United States has proven to be a stubborn problem, resisting even the most well-funded reform efforts. With the absence of computer science education in the mainstream K-12 curriculum, only a narrow band of students in public schools go on to careers in technology. The problem persists…

Background: Robotics competitions are increasingly popular and potentially provide an on-ramp to computer science, which is currently highly gender imbalanced. However, within competitive robotics teams, student participation in programming is not universal. This study gathered surveys from over 500 elementary, middle, and high school robotics…

While advances in game-based learning are already transforming educative practices globally, with tech giants like Microsoft, Apple and Google taking notice and investing in educational game initiatives, there is a concurrent and critically important development that focuses on "game construction" pedagogy as a vehicle for enhancing…

While many technical disciplines have reached or are moving toward gender parity in the number of bachelors degrees in those fields, the percentage of women graduating in computer science remains stubbornly low. Many recent efforts to address this situation have focused on retention of undergraduate majors or graduate students, recruiting…

The paper-and-pencil programming strategy (PPS) is a way of representing an idea logically by any representation that can be created using paper and pencil. It was developed for non-computer majors to improve their understanding and use of computational thinking and increase interest in learning computer science. A total of 110 non-majors in their…