Basu Satabdi, Biswas Gautam, Sengupta Pratim, Dickes Amanda, Kinnebrew John S, Clark Douglas
SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Avenue, Menlo Park, California, 94025 USA.
2Institute for Software Integrated Systems and EECS Department, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37212 USA.
Res Pract Technol Enhanc Learn. 2016;11(1):13. doi: 10.1186/s41039-016-0036-2. Epub 2016 May 21.
Computational thinking (CT) parallels the core practices of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and is believed to effectively support students' learning of science and math concepts. However, despite the synergies between CT and STEM education, integrating the two to support synergistic learning remains an important challenge. Relatively, little is known about how a student's conceptual understanding develops in such learning environments and the difficulties they face when learning with such integrated curricula. In this paper, we present a research study with CTSiM (Computational Thinking in Simulation and Modeling)-computational thinking-based learning environment for K-12 science, where students build and simulate computational models to study and gain an understanding of science processes. We investigate a set of core challenges (both computational and science domain related) that middle school students face when working with CTSiM, how these challenges evolve across different modeling activities, and the kinds of support provided by human observers that help students overcome these challenges. We identify four broad categories and 14 subcategories of challenges and show that the human-provided scaffolds help reduce the number of challenges students face over time. Finally, we discuss our plans to modify the CTSiM interfaces and embed scaffolding tools into CTSiM to help students overcome their various programming, modeling, and science-related challenges and thus gain a deeper understanding of the science concepts.
计算思维（CT）与科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）教育的核心实践并行，并且被认为能有效支持学生对科学和数学概念的学习。然而，尽管CT与STEM教育之间存在协同作用，但将两者整合以支持协同学习仍然是一项重大挑战。相对而言，对于学生在这种学习环境中的概念理解如何发展以及他们在使用这种整合课程学习时所面临的困难，我们了解得还很少。在本文中，我们展示了一项针对CTSiM（模拟与建模中的计算思维）——一种用于K-12科学教育的基于计算思维的学习环境——的研究，在该环境中，学生构建并模拟计算模型以研究科学过程并加深理解。我们调查了中学生在使用CTSiM时面临的一系列核心挑战（包括与计算和科学领域相关的挑战）、这些挑战在不同建模活动中的演变情况，以及人类观察者提供的何种支持能帮助学生克服这些挑战。我们识别出了四大类共14个子类别的挑战，并表明随着时间推移，人为提供的支架有助于减少学生面临的挑战数量。最后，我们讨论了修改CTSiM界面并将支架工具嵌入CTSiM的计划，以帮助学生克服他们在编程、建模以及与科学相关的各种挑战，从而更深入地理解科学概念。
