Computational thinking through unplugged activities in early years of Primary Education Abstract   The inclusion of computational thinking (CT) in the classroom is something that the present and future society is demanding. However, this domain remains largely unexplored, especially in the first years of Primary Education. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the inclusion of the socalled unplugged activities favours the development of CT in the students of the early years of Primary Education. To this end, a quasiexperimental study has been carried out to explore the eventual benefit of a mixed approach that combines both unplugged and pluggedin activities. In particular, 84xc2xa0secondgrade students took part in the experiment. Three questions were evaluated: the development of their CT skills, their motivation towards the proposed instruction, and the influence of studentsu0027 gender in the two previous areas. The intervention was designed on a selection of activities extracted from Code.org courses, and was divided into two phases, one in which one group worked with unplugged activities and the other with pluggedin activities, and a second where both groups worked with pluggedin activities. Analysing the three proposed questions through tests performed before, in between and after the instruction, it is concluded that the inclusion of unplugged activities in the instruction seems beneficial taking into account CT, motivation and gender.

Assessing computational thinking: A systematic review of empirical studies Abstract   With the increasing attention to Computational Thinking (CT) in education, there has been a concomitant rise of needs and interest in investigating how to assess CT skills. This study systematically reviewed how CT has been assessed in the literature. We reviewed 96 journal articles to analyze specific CT assessments from four perspectives: educational context, assessment construct, assessment type, and reliability and validity evidence. Our review results indicate that (a) more CT assessments are needed for high school, college students, and teacher professional development programs, (b) most CT assessments focus on studentsu0027 programming or computing skills, (c) traditional tests and performance assessments are often used to assess CT skills, and surveys are used to measure studentsxe2x80x99 CT dispositions, and (d) more reliability and validity evidence needs to be collected and reported in future studies. This review identifies current research gaps and future directions to conceptualize and assess CT skills, and the findings are expected to be beneficial for researchers, curriculum designers, and instructors.