Dear partners

We hope you are safe and well.

We are happy to tell you that we can finally start our Nordplus project "Assessing CT in Nordic Maker Education".

We warmly invite you to the kickoff meeting of the project on 22nd of November at 15:00-17:00 (EET).

The place for the kickoff meeting is in Oulu, Finland. Considering the remaining concerns for COVID-19, we organize the kickoff meeting hybrid: you can participate either physically or remotely. If you participate in the meeting physically the traveling cost will be covered by the project.

The content for the kickoff meeting is as below (there might be slight changes):

1. Introducing ourselves

2. Introducing the project

3. Introducing STEAM activities at school

4. Keynote about computational thinking

Scientific partners are preparing call for papers in CT special issue

Looking Ahead: Computational Thinking in K12 education

World-wide, in several countries, the term informatics is commonly used to refer to computer science (CS) and computing irrespectively to describe the disciplines that study and develop theories, model and applications of information technology. Computational thinking (CT) shares its elements with principles and concepts of those disciplines, as they are built upon similar foundations, such as algorithms, sequences and parallelization, control and automation, and data processing, representation and recognition.

Broadly speaking, CT refers to an approach of solving complex problems by applying a set of concepts, practices and dispositions which are fundamental to CS. In CS education, CT, a versatile concept that can be applied to different contexts, may be used as an aid to understand principles and concepts of CS.

In its broadest definition, different learning strategies can be considered within the scope of CT. For example, strategies like problem-based learning, collaborative learning, project-based learning, game-based learning, scaffolding or storytelling have been identified in the recent literature review.

What kind of subject and content matter can be recognized as a common educational arena for K-12 schools to practice and apply CT concepts and tools? What kind of educational approaches can provide interesting opportunities to apply CT and grasp abstract concepts of CT? Regardless of the increasing interest and continuous effort to integrate CT into K-12 education, there are still several critical issues: such as lack of consensus on operational definitions of CT, identifying CT skills, assessment methods, failures of integrating CT into curricula and in general. Thus, what we are lacking are ways to synthesize and integrate CT with existing educational practices. These issues together with a number of challenges associated with tools and environments at schools have arisen as central issues teachers need to confront with.

Within this specific focus of research, we will both aim to open a discussion about suitable approaches to integrate CT into K-12 education and to describe and elaborate on approaches for tackling the challenges presented above.

This Research Topic will explore some of the challenges and potential promises of CT. We are interested in empirical and non-empirical theoretical papers that demonstrate a wide variety of ideas and approaches related to different aspects connected to Computational Thinking in general.

We are particularly interested in articles that address some of the following topics:

• Educational experiences describing novel way in which educators have used CT in their teaching

• Theoretical definitions of CT

• Pedagogical approaches and CT

• 21th century skills and CT

• STE(A)M and CT

• Digital competencies and/or literacies for implementing CT

• Embedding computational thinking into the curriculum

• Assessment of CT

• Instructional design of lessons where CT is integrated into the activities

• Tools and methods to integrate CT into teaching and learning

• Empirical studies of effective practices of using CT

• Whole school approaches CT

• Pre- or in-service teacher education and CT

See journal webpage: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/27465/looking-ahead-computational-thinking-in-k12-education