The development and the evaluation of the effectiveness of the program design for computational thinking skill

Computational thinking, which is among of the 21st century skills, is defined as a skill that every individual should have and its importance is expressed in various studies. This skill has begun to take its place in the curriculum for students to gain; however, teachers of this training should also have this skill and the ability to transfer it. In the literature, there is no program design which is created to gain computational thinking skills and not solely comprising the field of information technologies. The aim of this research was to provide pre-service analytical skills to the students. This research aimed to contribute to the lack of the relevant literature through gaining prospective teachers computational thinking skills. With this purpose in mind, it was planned to prepare, implement and evaluate the program design for gaining computational thinking skills. In this study, a design-based research methodology was preferred which aiming at designing new products, incorporating an innovative perspective, including cycles of changes. According to design-based research methodology, the study continues until the desired result is obtained. In this study, the program for computational thinking skill was designed with a retrospective model and applied to the first study group. At the end of the implementation, the program design was updated in line with the evaluation of the obtained data and it was applied to another study group. The program design was finalized through the evaluation of the obtained data from the second implementation. The study group consisted of volunteered 11 students studying at the 3rd grade of the Department of Primary Education in a foundation university. Five prospective teachers took part in the first implementation and six of them were in the second implementation. The first implementation lasted for nine consecutive weekdays for a total of 40 hours, the second one continued for eight days at four weekends for a total of 52 hours. The activities in the program were selected from various subject areas and examples from daily life considering the content of the Department of Primary Education. The skill test including the dimensions of computational thinking was applied before and after the implementation to measure computational thinking skills and analytical rubric was developed for its evaluation. Dissertations for two main dimensions of computational thinking were also requested from the prospective teachers as an education graduation requirement. Analytical rubrics were also developed to evaluate these projects. While activity evaluation forms were used for evaluation of the program during the implementation, prospective teachers were interviewed at the end of the training. In addition, program design was also evaluated through taking expert opinion from different fields. As the investigator was also a practitioner due to the involvement in the whole process and the nature of design-based research, the research diary was used to describe the entire process. According to the research findings, there was an increase in computational thinking skills of prospective teachers. They indicated that they their problem solving, questioning, analytical thinking skills developed; they can use computational thinking in their professional life; they can prepare relevant activities; they can cooperate with those working in this field. They expressed that the training that they received should be taken by the individuals from each educational level, starting with the preschool; it is understandable in that it contains examples from everyday life; however, they have difficulty in algorithms. According to all the obtained data, it was concluded that the two-stage program design prepared for computational thinking skills was effective in the study group and suggestions were submitted to proliferate these kind of trainings.