Editorial

Abstract

The five articles presented in this issue explore different facets of computational thinking for learners from kindergarten through university. The first article in this issue, authored by de Ruiter and Bers, introduces a new instrument called the Coding Stages Assessment (CSA) and describes their work to establish its reliability and validity. The CSA is an open question assessment leveraging ScratchJr and prompts that are a mixture of verbal reasoning about code examples and coding completion tasks. Coding mastery is rated using the CSA along five theoretical stages: emergent, coding and decoding, fluency, new knowledge, and purposefulness. The current version of the instrument was used in a field test of 118 children between five and eight years old, and validity evidence is presented using classical test theory and item response theory. A key contribution of this work is that it addresses a critical lack of instruments for measuring coding knowledge gains among pre-literate primary school children. Hogenboom, Hermans, and van der Maas continue our focus on assessment instruments for primary school children in the second article of the issue. Their work introduces the web-based Computerized Adaptive Programming Concepts Test (CAPCT) built using the Math Garden system. The CAPCT is made up of over 4400 closed form questions which are dynamically presented to learners based on their prior responses. The authors analyze over 14 million responses from 93,341 Dutch primary school children and show that 75% of the response variance is explainable by item difficulty. This work is another promising approach to accurately measuring the development of programming knowledge among our youngest learners. The authors of the third article in this issue Tabletop games designed to promote computational thinking, Poole, Clarke-Midura, Rasmussen, Shehzad, and Lee turn our attention from the assessment of Computational Thinking to instructional means. In their analysis of tabletop games designed to foster concepts in Computational Thinking, they study code building, code execution, and puzzle games as well as combinations thereof. Their taxonomy and the resulting classification of 24 tabletop games provides researchers and educators with valuable input regarding which game to use with which group of learners to foster a given Computational Thinking construct. Vice versa, the authors derive a set of guidelines for the creation of tabletop games in this domain and suggest further directions for instruction and research. The fourth article in this issue, Experiential serious-game design for development of knowledge of object-oriented programming and computational thinking skills, also focuses on educational gaming. Authors Akkaya and Akpinar study the effects of a serious gaming approach to teaching concepts in object-oriented programming, Computational Thinking, and motivation in general. Using the framing of Experiential Learning, they tasked undergraduate students with engaging in a so-called serious game; this game had been designed by the authors incorporating both the Experiential Learning model and COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION 2022, VOL. 32, NO. 4, 385–387 https://doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2022.2148962