A Problem-Solving Approach to Enhance Computational Thinking Skills of Middle School Students
Abstract: Under mandated national educational curriculum, middle school students have one hour of Computer Technology class per week. The goal is to instill computational skill in students before heading to high school where text-based programming will be taught. After two years of implementation, it was found that most classes are only teaching fundamental coding constructs through visual programming tool. In this action research, a problem-solving approach for facilitating computational thinking is proposed and practiced. Experimental results show that students were able to learn to use computational thinking to devise a plan and to write program to solve the given problem. It was found that students’ computational thinking skill were significantly improved even if the visual programming tool was changed.