Designing a computational thinking workshop – content, monitoring and assessment framework

Abstract

There are many pedagogies that can be applied to teaching programming. Given the technicality of the subject, these pedagogies achieved different level of learning outcome and student engagement. Despite much effort in designing the structure of programming lesson/workshop today, little is done to understand the learning progress of participants and gathering in-depth feedback from them. Thus, evaluation of used pedagogies are often inaccurate and no improvement are made to the lesson/workshop. Therefore, the purpose of this project was to 1) create a learner’s analytics framework that provides meaningful feedback for improvement of the workshop and to, 2) design a computational thinking workshop using several teaching pedagogies to test the learner’s analytics framework. The learner’s analytics framework served as a post workshop review, which is a better alternative to survey forms. It allowed the instructor to understand the participant’s learning progress, which is reflected by the errors they made throughout the workshop. The analytics framework was able to display error statistics specific to parts of the workshop, and down to individual participant. These features allowed the instructor to draw meaningful conclusion about the workshop, evaluate the effectiveness of the pedagogies used, and to further improve the structure of the workshop.