Manuscript received August 22, 2024; revised September 10, 2024; accepted September 29, 2024; published December 11, 2024
Abstract—The aim of this paper is to present the construction, testing and validation of an instrument to assess the Computational Thinking skills of elementary school children, a tool that was developed as part of the PeCOT project, a research and pedagogical intervention project that seeks to introduce robotics activities in primary school classrooms, using the robot Azbot-1C, designed by the research team. The instrument whose validation we present is designed to assess the impact of the activities on the development of children’s computational thinking considering four essential competences: algorithmic thinking, patterns, decomposition, and abstraction. It takes the form of an activity sheet describing problems of different levels of complexity related to each of the four CT competences, which the children must solve for about an hour, in order assess the development of these skills in the children who will participate in the educational robotics activities that will be implemented during the second year of the project. Eight children aged between 8 and 10 took part in this validation. They answered the challenges at two different moments during the school year, thus reinforcing the instrument’s reliability. The results of solving each problem were scored, unforeseen situations were recorded and the analysis of the tasks presented made it possible to adjust the assessment tool in terms of its clarity, length and complexity. Ultimately, the instrument should be a valid contribution to help teachers and researchers observe and assess CT skills of children of this age, especially those currently carrying out activities related the implementation of the CT Project in the Azores.
Keywords—computational thinking, assessment instrument, educational robotics
Cite: Ana Isabel Santos, José Manuel Cascalho, Armando B. Mendes, Matthias Funk, Bárbara Amaral, Francisco Marques, and Paulo Medeiros, "Computational Thinking in Primary School Using Educational Robots: Construction and Validation of an Assessment Tool," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 14, no. 12, pp. 1652-1660, 2024.