An investigation of activities in information technology and software course in terms of computational thinking and some variables

The aim of this study is to investigate the difference of computational thinking as a result of doing activities in the teacher's guide book of the "Information Technologies and Software" which is a compulsory course for grade 5 and ICT area course in Turkey. Computational thinking is a set of skills that a person uses in the programming process, including mental skills such as problem solving and algorithmic thinking. The improvement of this skill is one of the aims of the renewed curriculum of ICT. Activities in the textbook consist of with computer and unplugged activities. With this research, it is aimed to evaluate the renewed curriculum of ICT course and to reveal the improvement of students' computational thinking skills. For this purpose; sampling of this study which was conducted two different public schools in Istanbul, consist of 122 students (n = 122). The model of the study is one group pre-test posttest from experimental models. The pre-test was done at the beginning of the school year and the posttest at the end. The measurement tool of the study is "Bebras International Informatics and Computational Thinking Challenge - 2017 Tasks" which was used for measuring students' computational thinking skills. A score between 0 and 135 is taken with the measurement tool. In addition, various demographic information of the students was obtained with a personal information form. "Paired Sample T-Test", "Independent Sample T-Test" and "Mann-Whitney U Test" were performed on the obtained data. As a result of this research, it has been determined that activities in Information Technology and Software course make a significant difference on the students' computational thinking skills (p = .000). According to age and taking brain games lesson, it was found that computational thinking skills scores were significantly different (p <.005). Furthermore, it has been determined that gender and pre-school education don't make a signification difference among factors, (p>.005).