Design and Evaluation of Computational Thinking Tasks in the <colette/> Project: Experiences Gained from Workshops with Secondary and Grammar School Students in Austria, the Netherlands, and Slovakia

In recent years, numerous applications (apps) for mobile devices have been developed for STEM education, but there is a lack of suitable educational apps that support teachers in promoting computational thinking (CT) in mathematics and computer science (CS) lessons. In this position paper, two types of CT tasks, Building Cubes and Draw-o-Bot, of the newly developed <colette/> app with augmented reality (AR) function, are described, and preliminary results from four workshops that were held in total with 76 10-18-year-old secondary and grammar school students in Austria (W1), the Netherlands (W2), and Slovakia (W3) are discussed. The tasks and the mobile app itself were created as part of the <colette/>-project, an Erasmus+ project, in which seven institutions from five European countries are involved. Each type of task includes a set of CT tasks related to the block-based programming (BBP) app. In the workshops, we set out to explore how the participating secondary school students solved the CT tasks, whilst using <colette/>. The experiences made in the workshops will be used to inform the further development of the application, and to prepare teacher training to support the successful implementation of <colette/> as an educational tool in schools. The first findings indicate that the participating students react positively to the app, can solve BBP tasks successfully, and create loops to shorten their code. In the future, further task types will be implemented in the app and researched.