Nowadays, using interactive video and computer games for educational purposes has become a popular subject of study. Recent empirical studies underline the fact that video games may contribute to the educational proce...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781908272188
Nowadays, using interactive video and computer games for educational purposes has become a popular subject of study. Recent empirical studies underline the fact that video games may contribute to the educational process. As programming and logical reasoning are concepts that quite a few high school students find hard to cope with, alternative approaches of teaching them should be explored. The use of Rapid Digital Game Creation (RDGC) for developing Computational Thinking (ComT) skills moves away the frame from simply getting programming knowledge on a specific language, having previously spent a large amount of time in the learning of its syntax, and gives students a boost while stimulating them through the development of interesting applications. Such interesting applications are games, as they can give students the opportunity to experiment their knowledge and to develop ComT skills, while at the same time can have fun. This paper presents an approach to incorporate games, multimedia and programming in order to motivate, help understand and improve analysis, synthesis and algorithmicskills. This approach took place as part of the educational process in a high school class with children at the age of 17-18 years, during "Multimedia" course. According to this approach, two types of projects were used. Firstly, a simplified demo version of a well known game was presented, and students had to reconstruct it from the beginning, with the same functionality. In the second project type, the rules of the game and the description of the behavior of the various actors in natural language, along with a demo version of a new game were given to them. The students were asked to reproduce the given demo, by using the RAD environment. This paper also presents a study that came through a process of an evaluation questionnaire answered by the students.
Computational thinking is a fundamental competence that is being introduced in K-12 and succeeding curricula worldwide. Despite this huge effort, many computational thinking models in the literature do not explicitly ...
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Computational thinking is a fundamental competence that is being introduced in K-12 and succeeding curricula worldwide. Despite this huge effort, many computational thinking models in the literature do not explicitly take into consideration the pupils' age and the developmental nature of computational thinking skills. Furthermore, many existing computational thinking models are focused on the internal thinking processes of the individuals, failing to explicitly consider the situated nature, in terms of social context and artefactual environment, that usually characterise tasks that require computational thinking to be solved. In this paper, we present a frame-work for the design, realisation, analysis, and assessment of computational thinking activities, called CT-cube. The CT-cube allows to extend existing computational thinking models to consider the life-long development of computational thinking skills in individuals, from childhood to adult age, and to take into consideration the situated nature of computational thinking activities. We use the CT-cube to design an unplugged task, called Cross Array Task (CAT), allowing to assess the algorithmicskills of K-12 pupils and we show how the CT-cube can be used in this case to illustrate the development of this competence along the entire compulsory school path, considering a sample of 109 pupil aged 3 to 16 in Switzerland.
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