A Methodology to Conduct Computational Thinking Activities in

Children’s Educational Context

Flavio Nicastro, M. Cec

ılia C. Baranauskas and Ricardo da S. Torres

Institute of Computing, University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

Keywords:

Computational Thinking, Computational Thinking Methodology, Creative Learning, Educational Methods.

Abstract:

Computational thinking (CT) development has been receiving considerable attention in academic discussions.

In this work, we propose a methodology for conducting computational thinking activities. The results from

a case study involving educators and children from 8 to 11 years old shows that they were pleased when

engaging in the development of activities following a methodology that encourages the reﬂection about what

they should do and about what results they are achieving. Some challenges were identiﬁed, as well as the need

of addressing them to reach acceptance of this kind of methodology by both children and educators. Our next

step will concern the evaluation of the use of this methodology, together with educators, in the planning of

CT-related activities.

1 INTRODUCTION

Education has been undergoing great transformations

in recent years. There is a growing number of papers

that advocate changes in the traditional educational

system. Some of those changes include: ﬁnishing

the division by subject, ﬁnishing the current model

of classrooms, or ﬁnishing the space-constrained ac-

tivities that limit the creativity of students. In this

new scenario, something that is in great evidence

is computational thinking. According to Jeannette

Wing (Wing, 2006), pages 33 and 35:

“Computational thinking is a fundamental

skill for everyone, not just for computer scien-

tists. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we

should add computational thinking to every

child analytical ability. Computational think-

ing is reformulating a seemingly difﬁcult prob-

lem into one we know how to solve, perhaps

by reduction, embedding, transformation, or

simulation. Computational thinking is a way

humans solve problems; it is not trying to get

humans to think like computers.”

From 2006 on, Wing published four more arti-

cles about the subject (Henderson et al., 2007; Wing,

2008; Wing, 2011; Wing and Stanzione, 2016), and

by taking into account a literature review, we found

several works about this research topic published in

various selective conferences and journals (Bau et al.,

2017; Yadav et al., 2017; Baranauskas and Carbajal,

363

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2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

NUM BER+ OF + PUBLI CA T I O NS

YEAR

RESULTS+OF+ THE+SEARCH+ON+GOOGLE+SCHOLAR+WITH+THE+TERM+"COMPUTATIONAL+THINKING"

Figure 1: Results of the search on google scholar with the

term “Computational Thinking”, as of December 2017.

2017; Grover and Pea, 2013; Denning, 2017; Araujo

et al., 2016; Perkovi

c et al., 2010; Barr and Stephen-

son, 2011; Guzdial, 2008; Basawapatna et al., 2011;

Repenning et al., 2010; Lu and Fletcher, 2009). In

Figure 1, we can see the result of a Google Scholar

search with the term “Computational Thinking”, and

we note the increasing number of publications related

to this term in recent years, especially after 2006.

This ﬁgure shows that the subject of computa-

tional thinking has been gaining more and more space

in academic discussions. However, there is still no

consensus on its terms and concepts, its boundaries,

and its scope (Baranauskas and Carbajal, 2017; Bren-

nan and Resnick, 2012). Based on Wing’s deﬁnitions

Nicastro, F., Baranauskas, M. and Torres, R.

A Methodology to Conduct Computational Thinking Activities in Children’s Educational Context.

In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2018) - Volume 2, pages 309-316

ISBN: 978-989-758-291-2

309

and on several other papers that aim to characterize

the term, we understand computational thinking as the

practice of the set of skills derived from Computer

Science that make the person able to approach prob-

lems in situations of his daily activities.

In recent years, there has also been a consider-

able increase in the number of systems used to teach

programming with lesson plans and guided activities,

such as Scratch

, Code.org

, and AppInventor

. Sys-

tems like those are being used in several educational

activities that aim at developing skills associated with

computational thinking around the world. However,

when conducting activities with such systems, educa-

tors do not follow or are not aware of well-established

procedures to guide students in their problem-solving

tasks. In the literature review, we have not found a

methodology that was formally described with the ob-

jective of conducting activities that aim at the devel-

opment of skills associated with computational think-

ing.

Given this scenario, this work proposes a method-

ology to help educators on conducting activities that

aim at the development of skills associated with com-

putational thinking. With the objective of analyzing

the performance of children in activities related to the

development of skills associated with computational

thinking, using the proposed methodology, we car-

ried out two workshops in August and September of

2017. These workshops are detailed in Section 4 and

involved educators and children from 8 to 11 years.

The results showed that both were pleased when en-

gaging in activities following a methodology that en-

courages them to reﬂect on what they should do and

on the results they are achieving. Some challenges

were identiﬁed, and it is necessary to address them to

foster the adoption of practices that aim at the devel-

opment of skills associated with computational think-

ing.

The remaining of this text is organized as fol-

lows: Section 2 presents related work in the area of

computational thinking; Section 3 introduces the pro-

posed methodology, while Section 4 describes a case

study concerning the use of the proposed methodol-

ogy in activities conducted with children. Finally,

Section 5 presents our conclusions and directions for

future work.

https://scratch.mit.edu (As of Dec. 2017).

https://code.org (As of Dec. 2017).

http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/ (As of Dec. 2017).

2 BACKGROUND

Computational Thinking is not something new. In

a search for publications with this term, we found

some papers on mathematics teaching (Bowes, 1955;

Arnold, 1962) published in the 1950s and 1960s.

More speciﬁcally, related to the context of computer

use in education, we found the article “Uses of Tech-

nology to Enhance Education” (Papert, 1973). In this

paper, Seymour Papert describes the proposal sent

to the National Science Foundation (in the United

States) asking for support on research about children’s

thoughts and elementary education. In the 1970s,

Seymour Papert pioneered the creation of the LOGO

language and in the studies about the learning pro-

cesses of children mediated by the use of program-

ming languages and artifacts, such as a robot turtle

that helped to understand the concepts of geometry

through programming in the LOGO language (Papert,

1980).

In 2006, the publication of Jeannette Wing, “Com-

putational Thinking” (Wing, 2006), had a signiﬁcant

impact in the computers & education community,

bringing popularity and interest of academics to the

subject. In this publication, Jeannette Wing presents

computational thinking as a set of problem-solving

mental processes derived from Computer Science ap-

plicable to any domain. It introduces the idea that

computational thinking is a central practice for all sci-

ences which is a fundamental and useful analytical

thinking skill for all people. It is used to break a dif-

ﬁcult problem into more familiar pieces that we can

solve (problem decomposition), using a set of rules to

ﬁnd solutions (algorithms), and using abstractions to

generalize these solutions to similar problems.

From this pioneering initiative on, several works

have been published on this topic. The article, “Com-

putational Thinking for Teacher Education” (Yadav

et al., 2017), reviews various papers that have been

written on this topic. The author draws attention to

the growing enthusiasm for computer science educa-

tion in many countries, such as Australia, USA, and

England. He points out that in 2012 the Royal Soci-

ety in England published that: “Every child should

have the opportunity to learn concepts and princi-

ples of computing, including computer science and

information technology, from the beginning of pri-

mary education”. It also states that in 2016, the US

College Board launched a new High School Com-

puter Science curriculum called “Principles of Com-

puter Science”, with a focus on exposing students to

computational thinking to help them understand how

computing inﬂuences the world. The author stresses

that within the computer science education commu-

CSEDU 2018 - 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

310

nity, computational thinking is a familiar term, but

there is confusion among teachers and managers of

what is really meant, mistakenly compared to the use

of technology and computers. In addition to pre-

senting the deﬁnition of computational thinking by

Jeannette Wing in 2006, he suggests some ideas that

would make it relevant to the key players involved in

elementary education and teacher training programs.

Complementing the deﬁnition of Wing, the authors

state that, according to the Computer Science Teach-

ers Association (CSTA) and the International Society

for Technology in Education (ISTE), computational

thinking relies on nine core concepts and capabili-

ties: data collection, data analysis, data representa-

tion, problem decomposition, abstraction, algorithms

and procedures, automation, parallelization, and sim-

ulation.

Although the concept is still formally undeﬁned,

there is some agreement on its meaning in the direc-

tion that computational thinking involves the mental

processes that occur in solving problems by creating

computer programs to solve them (Baranauskas and

Carbajal, 2017).

3 THE PROPOSED APPROACH

In this work, we propose a methodology to conduct

activities that aim at the development of skills asso-

ciated with computational thinking through a process

model to be followed in the conduction of these activ-

ities. In Figure 2, the methodology steps, which will

be detailed as follows, can be visualized. The symbol

of a full circle is used to indicate the initial state of the

process, while a small circle ﬁlled with an empty cir-

cle indicates the end of the process. The rectangles

with the rounded corners represent the main steps.

The ﬁrst and second steps contemplate the reﬂection

cycle and the third and fourth, the development cy-

cle. The light blue full arrow represents a precedence

relationship between steps. The full dark blue curve

shows a step in a cycle that must occur while are not

ready for the next one. The ﬁnal arrow indicates that,

at the end of the process, the work can be restarted by

initiating a new learning cycle.

The model is comprised of the following steps:

1. Planning: This stage consists in deﬁning the ob-

jectives of the activity and listing the steps that

must be followed to achieve such objectives.

2. Simulation: This step contemplates passing the

planning as if it were running, verifying if the de-

ﬁned steps lead to the objective of the activity. In

case of inconsistency, the planning step should be

performed again.

Figure 2: Proposed model for the process of conducting ac-

tivities.

3. Execution: In this step, the plan will be put into

practice. Considering, for example, an activity in

which a computer program should be developed,

one should code and test whether it is in accor-

dance with the plan.

4. Evaluation: This step consists in evaluating

the execution result. Should remain in the

cycle Execution→Evaluation→Execution while

failures in the execution are identiﬁed.

5. Decision: This step consists in verifying whether

the objective has been reached satisfactorily. If

so, the process should be terminated, and a new

learning cycle could be started. If not, one should

review the provided solution, deﬁne necessary

changes and return to the planning step.

The proposed methodology has the purpose of as-

sisting those interested in conducting an activity that

aims to develop a skill related to computational think-

ing (CT).

In Section 4, we present a case study realized with

a group of educators and children from 8 to 11 years

old, in which we used this methodology to conduct

some CT-related activities.

A Methodology to Conduct Computational Thinking Activities in Children’s Educational Context

311

4 CASE STUDY

With the objective of analyzing the performance of

children in activities related to the development of

skills associated with computational thinking, using

the proposed methodology, we carried out two work-

shops in August and September of 2017.

The workshops were conducted at PRODECAD

with the support of members of the InterHad

group

, as part of the project “Oﬁcinas de

Comunicac¸

ao Alternativa, Aumentativa e Criativa,

com crianc¸as, usando interfaces computacionais

vest

ıveis e tang

ıveis”

, and it consisted in carrying

out activities with educators and children using the

proposed methodology.

4.1 Experimental Protocol for the

Development of Activities

The activities consisted of creating a program on

a tablet using ScratchJr

following the proposed

methodology. The activities were carried out with six

educators and 14 children from 8 to 11 years. At the

beginning of each session, they were guided on the

purpose of the task, and the methodology and its cor-

respondent model was explained.

The solution development was expected to be per-

formed in two parts: ﬁrst, composed of the plan-

ning and simulation steps, the participants received

a printed sheet with a scenario (Figures 3 and 6)

and a paper with instructions, where they should de-

scribe what needed to be done to achieve the goal. Af-

ter these steps, they received a tablet with ScratchJr

and started the second part. In this part, they were

expected to create a program in ScratchJr, test, ver-

ify the result, and make a decision (if they should

redo/improve some aspect or if the result is satisfac-

tory). It was requested that all the reasoning be regis-

Programa de Desenvolvimento e Integrac¸

da Crianc¸a e do Adolescente: offers complemen-

tary education for children between 6 and 17 years

old, registered in the scholl Escola S

ergio Porto

(http://www.dgrh.unicamp.br/dedic/prodecad – As of

September 2017).

http://interhad.nied.unicamp.br (As of September

2017).

The project is duly registered in the ethics

committee of Unicamp under the CAAE Number:

55678316.4.0000.5404)

ScratchJr is an introductory programming language

speciﬁcally for tablets, inspired by Scratch (scratch.mit.edu

– As of Dec. 2017) and developed in collaboration between

the DevTech Research Group of Tufts University, the Life-

long Kindergarten Group at MIT Media Lab and Playful In-

vention Company (https://scratchjr.org – As of Dec. 2017).

tered and that if they redesigned something, previous

solutions (planning) should not be discarded (erased

from the sheet). This procedure aims to allow the

analysis of the development of reasoning throughout

the session.

The steps to follow were:

1. Plan what to do;

2. Simulate the activity with the help of the scenario

on paper;

3. Develop the program in ScratchJr;

4. Test and Evaluate the Result;

5. Analyze and Decide. Was the goal achieved?

No: What was wrong? Analyze what could have

been done differently and return to Step 1.

Yes: Are you satisﬁed with the result?

No: What can be done to improve it? Review

and return to step 1.

Yes: Propose a new challenge and start a new

activity.

At the end of each workshop all participants (chil-

dren and teachers) ﬁlled a Self-Assessment Manikin

(SAM) instrument (Bradley and Lang, 1994). SAM

is a nonverbal instrument of self-assessment of emo-

tions, speciﬁcally the level of pleasure, arousal, and

dominance, associated with the affective reaction of a

person to a stimulus, in this case, the activities with

tablets. It consists of a pictographic representation in

which each one could register their pleasure, arousal

and dominance in relation to the system that was be-

ing used. For each of the three dimensions of SAM,

the scale of responses ranges from one to nine, where

one represents the lowest level (of pleasure, arousal or

dominance) and nine represents the highest level. In

addition, the children answered a short questionnaire

about their perception of the workshop.

4.1.1 Workshop 1: Algorithmic Solution for a

Structured Problem

In the ﬁrst workshop, held on August,22 2017, the

program to be developed consisted in indicating the

“steps” of a character along a path until arriving

at a speciﬁc place. More speciﬁcally, the program

should contain the “steps” needed to get a rabbit to a

house (to meet Alice) by traversing the predetermined

squares on a board (Figure 3).

In this workshop, we held a preliminary session

with the teachers, using the same steps that would

be worked on with the children. The teachers have

had previous contact with ScratchJr’s programming-

like environment through TaPrEC (Carbajal and

CSEDU 2018 - 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

312

Início

Figure 3: Scenario created for the activity on Workshop 1.

Objetivo:

Fazer

coelho

percorrer

trilha

azul

ate

chegar

casa

Alice

para

tomar

cha



Planejamento

Descrever

passo

que

deve

ser

feito

para

atingir

objetivo



4+1



A-



Figure 4: Procedure (in Portuguese) recorded by a group of

teachers in Workshop 1.

Baranauskas, 2015). The TaPrEC allows program-

ming based on the use of wooden blocks that are

docked to deﬁne the movements of the character. The

program developed in TaPrEC leads to an algorithm

that is more symbolic than descriptive. With this, the

two groups of teachers who participated in the work-

shop simply put a sequence with the number of steps

to walk and the direction of the vertical movement (↓

or ↑) or horizontal (→ or ←) - for example, 8 →, 4↓,

etc., as we can see in Figure 4.

After the session with the teachers, we performed

similar procedures with the participation of the chil-

dren. They were split into pairs and the forms were

handed over to them. After the planning phase,

the children received a tablet with ScratchJr, pre-

conﬁgured with the board and programmed so that,

when the rabbit meets Alice, a bell would be played

and an invitation (to have a tea with Alice) would ap-

pear on the screen.

All pairs of children used literal descriptions of

what should be done. Some children opted for more

detailed descriptions such as “He has to walk eight

squares forward, turn right and ...”. Other pairs were

based on the drawings that were in the path: “First go

through the clock and then go through the plate and

turn right ...”. Examples of these solutions are shown

in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Procedures (in Portuguese) registered by two pairs

of students in Workshop 1.

(a) Scenario (b) Meet with Lambi Zambi

Figure 6: Example of screens related to the scenario and the

meeting of characters in Workshop 2.

4.1.2 Workshop 2: Algorithmic Solution for an

Unstructured Problem

The second workshop was held on September, 12

2017. In this workshop, a strategy was adopted in

which the participants would have more freedom to

create their solutions. They could determine their own

path to be taken, without any paths predeﬁned on the

scenario. As in workshop 1, the goal was to take the

rabbit character to meet Alice. We also included some

other characters in the scenario, whose names should

be discovered. They were also told about the exis-

tence of a hidden character and that they should ﬁnd

out who it was. The tablet was customized with the

scenario as shown in Figure 6 (a). Also, when the rab-

bit meets another character in his way to Alice, a mes-

sage appears on the screen with the character’s name.

When the horse in the scenario is met, a sound is emit-

ted and a wizard (the hidden character) appears on the

middle of the screen saying his name – as shown in

Figure 6 (b), (c), and (d).

In this workshop, children were already aware of

A Methodology to Conduct Computational Thinking Activities in Children’s Educational Context

313

Figure 7: Visibly redone procedure (in Portuguese) by a pair

of students in Workshop 2.

ScratchJr and how to develop their solutions on the

tablet because all of them took part in workshop 1.

This caused an anxiety in most of them in the plan-

ning phase, because they wanted the tablets to pro-

gram as soon as possible. In fact, most of them ﬁn-

ished the planning step very quickly, which led to the

creation of very simplistic descriptions of the solu-

tions. On the other hand, two pairs took much longer

than the others at this stage, even comparing with

mean time observed in the ﬁrst workshop. These

pairs actually engaged in the planning and simulation

phase, including drawing paths in the scenario. When

they started programming, they were much faster and

made a much more succinct program.

Another point we noticed is that children resist the

idea of not erasing what they planned when they redo

it. Note, for example, in the procedure described by

a pair in Figure 7, in which even the names of the

characters are already present; something that could

only be discovered after running the program on the

tablet.

4.2 Results and Analysis

During the planning and simulation phase, all pairs

were quite entertained and developed their own plan-

ning to solve the task. We note that everyone was en-

gaged in the paper planning and simulation and after

receiving the tablet, developed their programs in ac-

cordance with what was planned. But when the exe-

cution did not reach the goal, they did not go back and

analyzed the planning to understand what was wrong,

to devise and implement possible new solutions. In

general, they opted for a trial-and-error-based solu-

tion strategy, instead of analyzing possible mistakes

in a planned solution to redesign a novel solution for

the problem. In the end, all the pairs succeeded in

reaching the goal with regard to proposing a correct

solution to the problem.

From the comments on the questionnaire (which

contained questions about what one liked and disliked

the most, and about suggestions from both the work-

shop and the system), we can observe that both edu-

cators and children generally liked the workshops and

did not point any negative aspect.

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Figure 8: Results of SAM with teachers – 1st Workshop.

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Figure 9: Results of SAM with children – 1st Workshop.

Among the teachers, one suggested the inclusion

of commands to make the execution faster (e.g., com-

mands to skip squares), another suggested the diversi-

ﬁcation of commands in the system, and two teachers

complained about the size (possibly referring to the

size of the scenario on the tablet screen).

Figures 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 show the results about the

SAM and the perception of the workshops.

With regard to the teachers (Figure 8), in relation

to the dimensions of Pleasure and Arousal, all of them

experienced a positive affective response. In relation

to the Dominance, 50% presented a positive affective

response, and 50%, neutral.

With the children (Figures 9 and 10), we obtained

100% positive responses to the Pleasure dimension,

both in the ﬁrst and second workshops. In the dimen-

sion of Arousal, 78% positive affective response in the

ﬁrst one increasing to 93% in the second workshops.

In the Dominance dimension, we noticed the negative

affective response by 28.5% of the children in the ﬁrst

workshop, reducing to 14% in the second workshop.

Regarding how they evaluate the activities and

how they evaluate the system (Figures 11 and 12),

100% evaluated as Very Good or Good.

Based on the conducted workshops, we came up

with some guidelines that may improve the imple-

CSEDU 2018 - 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

314

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Figure 10: Results of SAM with children – 2nd Workshop.

VERY GOOD GOOD REGU LAR BAD VERY BAD

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS

HOW DO THEY EVALUATE THE WORKSHOP

Works hop 1 Workshop 2

Figure 11: Workshop evaluation by children.

VERY GOOD GOOD REGU LAR BAD VERY BAD

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS

HOW DO THEY EVALUATE THE SYSTEM

Works hop 1 Workshop 2

Figure 12: System evaluation by children.

mentation and evaluation of this kind of activities us-

ing the propose methodology:

• Record the time spent in each activity and corre-

late the observed times with the quality of the pro-

gram developed.

• Observe the comments of children during their

interaction, both in the planning and simulation

phase, as well as in the programming and testing

phase.

• Develop strategies to keep track of the develop-

ment of the reasoning strategies of children.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Although the subject of computational thinking has

attracted attention of researchers in the computers and

education ﬁeld, especially in the last years, literature

still lacks a formal methodology to address the devel-

opment of skills associated with computational think-

ing. In this paper, we analyzed existing literature on

computational thinking and proposed a methodology

to conduct activities that may foster its development

in an educational context.

We experimented the proposed methodology with

children from 8 to 11 years old and their teachers. The

activities aimed at the development of computational

thinking skills by means of solving proposed prob-

lems using ScratchJr in a tablet. The analysis of re-

sults from these workshop shows that both educators

and children were pleased when engaging in the de-

velopment of activities following a methodology that

encourages them to reﬂect about what they should do

to solve a problem and about the results achieved.

For future work, we intend to evaluate the use of

this methodology in other educational scenarios, and

conduct some workshops with educators using this

methodology for planning activities. Additionally, we

also plan to develop a platform for supporting the use

of the methodology in the development of computa-

tional thinking, with the possibility of sharing activ-

ities, experiences, validations, and evaluations of the

proposed methodology.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Authors are grateful to CAPES, CNPq (grants

#308618/2014 − 9 and #307560/2016 − 3), and

FAPESP (grant #2015/16528 −0) funding agency for

their support.

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