A Human-Centred Tangible approach to learning Computational Thinking

Abstract

Computational Thinking has recently become a focus of many teaching and research domains; it encapsulates those thinking skills integral to solving complex problems using a computer, thus being widely applicable in our society. It is influencing research across many disciplines and also coming into the limelight of education, mostly thanks to public initiatives such as the Hour of Code. In this paper we present our arguments for promoting Computational Thinking in education through the Human-centred paradigm of Tangible End-User Development, namely by exploiting objects whose interactions with the physical environment are mapped to digital actions performed on the system.

Trends and Gaps

“…Formal challenges: Dealing with large numbers of simple objects seems like ideal territory for formal methods. On the configuration side, Chapter 16 shows how workflow notations can be used to connect together apps to make larger functionality; this could be combined with techniques to infer or tangibly programme connections (Turchi and Malizia, 2016). Feature interactions have been studied for many years in telecoms, so there should be knowledge that could be borrowed and modified to deal with other kinds of complex assemblies.…”