Primary school students' intrinsic motivation to plugged and unplugged approaches to develop computational thinking

Abstract

This paper compared primary school students' intrinsic motivation to plugged and unplugged approaches to develop computational thinking using a revised Intrinsic Motivation Inventory. A total of 400 fourth-graders who have completed a school-provided coding course participated in the study. The revised instrument examined students' motivation of the two learning approaches from four dimensions: interest, perceived competence, value and relatedness. The main findings of the study are: (1) primary school students show moderate to high motivation to learn computational thinking through both plugged and unplugged approaches; (2) compared to unplugged approach, students gain higher perceived competence from plugged approach; and (3) the revised Intrinsic Motivation Inventory has good psychometric properties in the context of computational thinking except for the close correlation among different dimensions. Finally, implications for developing computational thinking with mobile devices were proposed.