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Integrated Digital Education -Computational Thinking For Everyone
Abstract
Jeannette Wing defines computational thinking as fundamental skill for everyone. When Austria introduced the new mandatory subject "basic digital education" in September 2018 for all students in grade 6, computational thinking finally found its way into the school system. Schools can decide if they offer specific subjects or if they implement the curriculum in an integrative way in several subjects. The new curriculum was installed rashly and without any suitable preparation for teachers or schools. However, schools still fight the problem who is teaching and how, because most schools just cannot install a stand-alone subject. This results in the fact that non IT teachers have to teach the contents of this curriculum, too. Subsequently, there is a strong need for new materials that help teachers dealing with the unfamiliar subject. Hence, creative ideas for the implementation of the new curriculum are required because the schools need support concerning the contents as well as teaching concepts and materials for a cross-curricular introduction to computational thinking. This paper takes a closer look at the first experiences with the subject "digital education" when taught integrated in non IT-subjects by teachers without or little computer science background. It further presents the results of a survey conducted in various Austrian schools concerning experiences and challenges around the implementation of the new curriculum.
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Various aspects of computational thinking, which builds on the power and limits of computing processes, whether they are executed by a human or by a machine, are discussed. Computational methods and models are helping to solve problems, design systems, and understand human behavior, by drawing on concepts fundamental to computer science (CS). Computational thinking (CT) is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task or designing a large complex systems. CT is the way of thinking in terms of prevention, protection, and recovery from worst-case scenarios through redundancy, damage containment, and error correction. CT is using heuristic reasoning to discover a solution and using massive amount of data to speed up computation. CT is a futuristic vision to guide computer science educators, researchers, and practitioners to change society's image of the computer science field.
Centuries ago, the existence of life was explained by the presence of a soul (Tylor, 1871). Known as animism, this term was re-defined in the 1970s by Piaget as young children's beliefs that inanimate objects are capable of actions and have life-like qualities. With the development of robots in the 21st century, researchers have begun examining whether animism is apparent in children's impressions of robots. The purpose of this study was to use a model of knowledge structures, or schemata, to examine whether children attribute human qualities of cognition, affect, and behavior to a robot. An experiment was set up at a science center located in a major Western Canadian city, and visitors to the center were invited to participate. A total of 198 children ages 5–16 years (M=8.18 years) with an approximate even number of boys and girls were included. Children completed a semi-structured interview after observing a robot, a small 5 degree of freedom robot arm, perform a block stacking task. Answers to the nine questions about the robot were scored according to whether they referenced humanistic qualities. Results from frequency and content analyses suggest that a significant proportion of children ascribe cognitive, behavioral, and especially affective, characteristics to robots.
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