Page 23 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

examples for CT implementation in various courses. While this example is not 1 from K-12 education, it is illustrative of the challenges facing educators who are
about to engage in teaching CT.
Lee et al. (2011) formulated suggestions for instructional strategies supporting the development of CT, too. First, they advise to have students work in rich computational environments, and second, to scaffold interactions into a three- stage progression that describe the stages of engagement of learners in these rich computational environments: use — modify — create. Touretzky et al. (2013) suggest a progression from simple to more complex programming language in a CS course in order to bring students closer to true CT.
Teaching goes hand in hand with assessment, so when CT finds its way into the education, the question arises how to assess it. There are already numerous attempts to do so: for example, Koh et al. (2014) developed Computational Thinking Pattern Analysis to analyze CT patterns in games submitted by students and found that a promising approach. Werner et al. (2012) looked at the games produced by their students too and based their assessment on the CT framework developed at CMCCT (Carnegie Mellon Center for Computational Thinking, 2010). They asked middle school students to modify and fix existing Alice programs in order to assess the first two aspect of the CMCCT framework (making use of abstraction and modeling, and thinking algorithmically) and concluded that this was a promising strategy for assessment (Werner et al., 2012). Similarly, Brennan and Resnick (2012) — after having developed their framework that describes CT in terms of computational concepts, computational practices and computational perspectives — tried three approaches to assess the development of CT of young people programming in Scratch. They describe strengths and limitations of these approaches, conclude that none of them was particularly effective, and finally formulate six suggestions for assessing CT via programming (Brennan & Resnick, 2012):
1. assessment should support further learning
2. creating and examining projects should be an integral part of the
assessment
3. the project designer should illuminate the design process
4. (formative) assessment should take place at multiple moments
during the project development
5. value multiple ways of knowing
6. include multiple viewpoints.
Introduction
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