Computational Thinking App Design Mat: Supporting the Development of Students' Computational Thinking Skills (Abstract Only)

Tools like MIT App Inventor and Scratch are designed to help students develop programming and computational thinking skills by allowing them to use their interest and personal experiences to create meaningful artifacts. However, students often need additional help in translating their ideas into functional programs because they lack understanding of how to map the visual aspects of their projects to programming constructs and understanding of how to develop appropriate algorithms that bring their ideas to life. To address this issue, we created a Computational Thinking App Design Mat (App Design Mat) to scaffolds students' CT skill development in the context of creating a mobile application with MIT APP Inventor 2. The App Design Mat fosters student engagement in computational thinking through four areas of the mat: Problem Decomposition, Pattern Abstraction, Pattern Recognition, and Algorithm Design. In this poster will describe the design and results from the use of the App Design Mat with 80 eighth grade students. Our results suggest that most students understood the purpose of using the App Design Mat, used the App Design Mat effectively, and used some aspects of the App Design Mat in developing their final mobile app project.