Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p27535"

The purpose of this study is to increase scientific understanding of children's conceptual change in computational thinking during a summer school intervention. With a mixed method approach of self-report questionnaire and interview, the investigation highlights modern children's knowledge, beliefs and understanding of as well as attitudes, emotions and motivations towards computers, programming and artificial intelligence. Think-aloud –tasks are also used to investigate children's computational thought processes. The SRQ data with an intervention group (n = 28) and a comparison group (n = 21) was analysed with repeated measures and independent samples t-tests, MANOVA and ANCOVA, with the pretest condition as covariate. The data revealed a change in the intervention group's conceptions about embedded cyber-physical systems and the application of computers in different industrial and artistic fields. A slight shift towards a strong AI –mindset was discovered in the intervention group through the SRQ. The interviews for the intervention group (n = 6) and two comparison groups (n = 4, material comparison n = 4) reinforced this conclusion and showed a strong enhancement of computational thinking attitudes and perspectives in the intervention group in contrast to the comparison groups. The computational skills were found to be tightly knit to level of mathematical understanding, and didn't change notably during the summer school intervention.