Editorial - Special Issue on Computational Thinking and Coding in Childhood

摘要

This Special Issue on Computational Thinking and Coding in Childhood brings together ten articles addressing the topic from a range of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds. Amid increased international interest in younger children's engagement with computer science and programming, many questions remain about how to provide tools, environments and curricula that embody appropriate progression and engender motivation for these topics across the years. The papers in this volume address and discuss a number of these questions, as well as raising important new questions. The idea for the Special Issue was prompted by our 2015 Interaction Design and Children Workshop "Every Child a Coder? Research Challenges for a 5-18 Programming Curriculum" [1]. A key workshop activity involved participants with expertise in computer science, education, and developmental psychology collaborating on sketching a roadmap for computational thinking development. This prompted interesting discussions about how key concepts, such as abstraction, problem decomposition, states and data structures, might map to abilities and motivations at different developmental stages. Our conversations suggested the need for a spiral curriculum, where knowledge develops and deepens over time with repeated revisiting of concepts using relevant examples. Workshop participants also highlighted the importance of assessment methods and developmentally appropriate tools and activities, and emphasised the benefits of drawing on educational theory in related subjects long taught to younger children, such as mathematics.