Using cultural viewpoint metaphors in the analysis of computational thinking teaching

Abstract

There are several experience reports on teaching computational thinking (CT) to children in a playful way. However, we did not find in the literature any studies presenting a well defined proposal of types of tools or methods that could be adopted to teach different concepts of computational thinking. Therefore, we investigate whether Cultural Viewpoint Metaphors (CVM) could be a good way to analyze, classify, and indicate which CT tools and teaching approaches existing studies are addressing. We first analyze existing research on teaching computational thinking to middle school students in Brazil. Then, the tools and methods used in those works in light of CVM. Our findings show positive results regarding the possibility of using CVM as a foundation to classify tools and methods for teaching CT.