Case Study: Integrating Computational Thinking into the Introductory Course of Computer Science via the Use of the Programming Language Python

摘要

The purpose of this study is the integration of computational thinking in the introductory course "Introduction to Computer Science" of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. After the publication of Jeanette Wing's innovative article, computational thinking became of interest for the educational community and nowadays is considered as important as writing, reading and arithmetic. This research attempts to integrate the computational thinking skill in the introductory course of the Computer Science department. In order for this goal to be achieved and its results to be as good as possible, the related literature was looked into, for the lesson to meet, specifically the part of which is dealing with the computational thinking concepts, the formal and informal criteria that have been set. For the purposes of the research some presentations were developed based on four fundamental concepts of computational thinking, decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction and algorithms. Also, a part of them was about Python, the programming language which was an accompanying tool of the lesson and consequently of computational thinking. Except from the presentations, two assignments were designed and developed in order to assess the progress of the skill in the participants and also a part of the final test was dedicated to that assessment, too. The results showed that there was no statistically significant difference in the performance of participants between the two tests/assignments conducted.