The effect of teacher interventions and SRA Robot programming on the development of computational thinking

The implementation of programming in primary education is currently receiving a considerable amount of attention in the context of developing 21st century skills and digital literacy. The application of programmable robots is a playful integration of developing programming skills and computational thinking. Once pupils understand the basics of robot programming, they can solve challenging new programming tasks themselves without the teacher taking over too much of the learning process. It is therefore worthwhile to investigate the extent to which teachers’ instructional approach and guiding interventions influence the development of pupils’ computational thinking. Furthermore, programming robots have some special affordances for educational purposes as robots typically have to be programmed to interact with their environment. Little evidence is known to which extent programmable robots using the SRA-approach contribute to the development of computational thinking skills among primary school pupils. The use of Sense, Reason and Act (SRA) programming includes the application of loops, routines and conditionals when controlling actuators on the basis of sensory information with which the robot can anticipate changes in the environment. Our findings indicate that teachers versus students experience the way of teaching (perceived monitoring and scaffolding) significantly different when programming robots. We make recommendations as to which competences the guiding teacher needs. It is also shown that programming robots using an SRA-approach contribute to the development of specific characteristics (reformulating problems, problem decomposition, abstraction, algorithms and procedures & parallelisation) of computational thinking.