Effectiveness of KIBO educational robotics-based activities on preschoolers’ computational thinking skills

Date

2024-2

Author

Köklü Yaylacı, Hasret

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

611
views

1634
downloads

Cite This

This study mainly investigated the effect of the Coding as Literacy-KIBO (CALKIBO) kindergarten curriculum on preschool children’s computational thinking (CT) skills. This study also examined the effects of gender and age in month on children’s CT skills. For the first purpose, data on CT skills were collected through two assessment tools, TechCheck-K and TACTIC-KIBO. TechCheck-K is an unplugged assessment tool that does not require coding/programming experience and was used for pretest and posttest administrations to compare CT skills in the control and experimental groups. The TACTIC-KIBO is a plugged-in assessment tool that requires preschool children’s coding/programming experience with KIBO robotics and was used to examine the experimental group children’s programming-based CT skills after implementation by categorizing them as proto-programmers, early programmers, and programmers. The results showed that the CAL-KIBO kindergarten curriculum significantly contributed to the development of CT skills in the experimental group and mostly developed powerful ideas were hardware/software, debugging, and control structures (with a ceiling effect). The TACTIC-KIBO results showed that the majority of children in the experimental group reached the programmer level. Moreover, while the challenging powerful idea was design process, the challenging task for preschool children was programming by repetition loops. Finally, gender and age in month were not significant predictors of CT skills. However, the score gap between two age-in-month groups decreased in the experimental group after implementation, while the score gap in age-in-month groups remained in the control group. This demonstrated the developmental appropriateness of the CAL-KIBO kindergarten curriculum when used with preschool children.

Subject Keywords

Computational Thinking Skills in Early Childhood, Educational Robotics Based Coding and Programming, TechCheck-K, TACTIC-KIBO, CAL-KIBO

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/108378

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis