Developing pre-service teachers’ computational thinking through unplugged approaches

Abstract

Computational thinking (CT) skills are one of the most important skills for solving problems in technology-driven daily life. Although CT skills are an objective in the curriculum framework in education, there are not many research studies related to the development of CT competencies in pre-service teachers that will be used in the process of integrating CT in their learning design. In this study, with reference to the experiential learning framework, we conducted a study related to the design of a new approach to the learning process that is a hybrid of the CT approach. The purpose of this study was to facilitate pre-service teachers to follow the CT module for six (six) weeks. The results showed that the participants were able to develop better CT competence by integrating, justifying, and reflecting CT in their learning processes. This study shows that it is important to provide practical and easy-to-use CT modules on unplugged activities to pre-service teachers, especially for those who do not have basic knowledge related to computing.