Page 104 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

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Chapter 5
by the different description types: natural language — either with a prescriptive structure, such as ODD protocol, or without it, such as verbal description; formal languages — ranging from various ontologies, source code, pseudo code to mathematical description, and finally graphics — either formal such as UML, or non-formal. In case of communication for education, they suggest that non- formal verbal description, source code made with the program-level tools (such as, for example, NetLogo (Wilensky, 1999)) and non-formal graphics are among the most suitable description types, while formal descriptions with ODD protocol or UML as well as non-specialized programming languages are less suitable. They conclude by suggesting “a minimum standard of model description”.
5.2.3 Assessment
Brennan and Resnick focused on assessment of the development of CT during learning in informal settings and developed a CT framework distinguishing three dimensions: computational concepts describing the concepts designers employ when programming, namely sequences, loops, parallelism, events, conditionals, operators, and data; computational practices describing the practices designers employ when engaging with the concepts, namely being incremental and iterative, testing and debugging, reusing and remixing, and abstracting and modularizing, and computational perspectives describing the perspectives designers form about the world around them and about themselves, namely expressing, connecting and questioning (Brennan & Resnick, 2012). Zhong et al. (2016) brought these three dimensions of CT into the classroom when designing an assessment framework for elementary school students and they redefined them as follows: computational concepts as ”objects, instructions, sequences, loops, parallelism, events, conditionals, operators, and data”; computational practices as “planning and designing, abstracting and modeling, modularizing and reusing, iterative and optimizing, and testing and debugging”, and computational perspectives as “creative and expressing, communicating and collaborating, and understanding and questioning”. Using this framework, Lye and Koh (2014) analyzed 27 intervention studies in K-12 aiming at the development of computational thinking through programming and found that the majority focuses on computational concepts and only six on computational practices. In order to promote focus on computational practices and computational perspectives in a K-12 classroom, they suggest an instructional approach providing “a constructionism-based problem-solving learning environment, with information processing, scaffolding and reflection activities.” Brennan and Resnick