O desafio do desenvolvimento do pensamento computacional na escola: vivenciando experiências e construindo habilidades

Abstract

The following document presents a research about the development of Computational Thinking abilities on children from the 4th to 7th years of Elementary School. This research emerges from a reflection on the needs of changes on the school system, regarding the new profile of students from the 21st century. A literature review shows Computational Thinking as one of the trends on Education for these students. Computational Thinking theory, which also serves as basis to this research, presents this kind of thinking as a fundamental set of skills for the citizen of current society. It is the ability to think like a computer scientist towards problem-solving, and it relies on the abilities of decomposition, abstraction and design. The present project has as a main objective to evaluate the development of those skills through activities executed on the Scratch software, which was created for the teaching of programming for children. Based on Seymour Papert‟s Constructionism and the afore mentioned Computational Thinking theory, each encounter has produced data, which were analyzed and discussed under the light of these Theories. The results from the analysis have shown that the coding activities os Scratch are an effective way of developing Computational Thinking skills on students from Elementary School. The collected data have originated an educational product, which is a teaching guide, with its objectives, activities and evaluation methods, in such a way that it can be used and adapted to any school with a simple computer lab.