The effect of internet of things education on primary pre-service teachers' project performance, computational thinking, and design thinking

In today's world, where technology is developing rapidly, one of the biggest needs is for trained human resources who are experts in the digital world. Classroom teachers at the primary school level, which is seen as the basis of education, have a significant responsibility in this regard. The aim of this study is to determine the effect of education enriched with Internet of Things (IoT) technology, which has gained importance in recent years, on project performance, computational thinking, and design thinking of pre-service classroom teachers, and to reveal their opinions about this education. The research was implemented in the fall semester of the 2023-2024 academic year. The study group consists of a total of 64 third and fourth year students, 32 of whom are in the experimental group and 32 of whom are in the control group, studying in the Classroom Teaching Undergraduate Program at Bartın University. In the quantitative dimension of this study, in which the variation mixed method was used, a pre-test-post-test design with a control group, one of the quasi-experimental designs, was applied. In the qualitative dimension of the study, phenomenological design was used to define the perspective of primary school teacher candidates towards IoT education in depth. The course, which included the concepts and studies of IoT applied to the experimental group, lasted a total of 8 weeks, including 7 weeks of lectures and one week of project exhibition. The control group was informed in a basic sense. The "Computational Thinking Scale" developed by Ertuğrul-Akyol (2020) and the "Design Thinking Tendencies Scale" developed by the researcher were applied to the control and experimental groups in the quantitative dimension. In the qualitative dimension of the research, data were obtained from the rubric in which the performances of the IoT projects designed by the experimental group students were evaluated, and from the diary and semi-structured interview questions they kept at the end of each training week. SPSS 23.0 package program was used in the analysis of quantitative data. Hypotheses were created to analyze the data, and one-way covariance analysis (ANCOVA) was performed. For the qualitative data, Rasch analysis was applied for the rubric measurement tool, descriptive analysis was applied for the semi-structured interview tool, and content analysis was applied for the log data. According to the findings obtained from the study, a significant difference was observed in favor of the experimental group in the pre-test and post-test mean scores of the computational and design thinking of the pre-service classroom teachers in the IoT education. In the qualitative data, when the project performances of all students were examined, it was seen that they completed the projects in working condition. When reflective diary and semi-structured interview questions were evaluated, it was found that although the experimental group students did not have knowledge about the concepts of IoT and Industry 4.0 at the beginning, they saw the predictive effect on their future professions after IoT education and that robotic coding containing IoT technology could be applied at all primary school levels starting from the primary school level. In the light of these findings, it was concluded that the IoT training received by pre-service classroom teachers positively affected their project performance, computational thinking, and design-oriented thinking. In the research, suggestions such as adding a course on IoT and robotic coding to the Classroom Teaching Undergraduate Program and improving themselves in this context were included.