The Development of Computational Thinking Concepts in Course Participants’ Programming Solutions

With low student satisfaction and high drop-out rates, programming education has been labelled bymany as problematic learning in higher education. Many countries have integrated programming inkindergarten to grade 12 educations to better prepare students for a digitalised society. A commonconcept in this context is computational thinking. In this study, the concept is applied in a teacherprofessional development course on fundamental programming. The aim of the study is to identify anddiscuss the development of computational thinking in course participants’ programming solutions in ateacher professional development course on fundamental programming. The study was conducted with an action research approach. Collected data consists of 35 courseparticipants’ programming solutions from two iterations of a teacher professional development course onfundamental programming. A combination of text mining and process mining were used to analyse thecollected data. First, an algorithm was developed with the Python programming language that analysethe collected data. Second, the algorithm’s output was converted to a spreadsheet for a manual controlof the coding. Third, a process mining tool was used to analyse the coded data. Results of the study show that several indicators of development in computational thinking can beidentified in the programming solutions. The conclusion of the study is that computational thinkingconcepts in programming solutions can serve as indicators of course participants’ development asprogrammers. This can be drawn upon by stakeholders for course completion forecast or drop-outinterventions