Approaches for Teaching Computational Thinking Strategies in an Educational Game: A Position Paper

Abstract—Computer science is expanding into K12 education and numerous educational games and systems have been cre-ated to teach programming skills, including many block-based programming environments. Teaching computational thinking has received particular attention, and more research is needed on using educational games to directly teach computational thinking skills. We propose to investigate this using Dragon Architect, an educational block-based programming game we are developing. Specifically, we wish to study ways of directly teaching computational thinking strategies such as divide and conquer in an educational game, as well as ways to evaluate our approaches. Keywords—block-based programming, game-based learning, computational thinking, CS education I