Engaging Estonian primary school children in computational thinking through adaptive educational games: A qualitative study

Abstract

While computational thinking (CT) has been identified as one of the fundamental 21st century skills that can be applied to different domains, school students usually show negative attitude toward learning CT. Educational games have been applied by several researchers to address related issues faced for promoting CT. Even though such games have shown some success in promoting CT, they fall short when it comes to acquisition of CT skills (they rather promote abstract and conceptual knowledge) and offering adaptivity to each player. To address these issues and improve the existing games, we developed an adaptive game called AutoThinking for teaching both CT concepts and skills, engaging students with individually tailored gameplay and learning. We conducted a qualitative study aimed at understanding the cognitive and affective experiences of Estonian primary school children. The findings showed that AutoThinking is making children feel challenged, happy, and confident, while activating their thinking process during the gameplay. All children perceived the game positively and found it to be a good tool for learning.