Informatics in Education

Computational thinking (CT) is widely recognized as a key 21st-century competence, yet its integration across disciplines remains unclear for many educators. This study explores how prospective teachers identify and express CT through scripts representing computational processes in school subjects of their choice. The challenge of integrating CT in teacher preparation programs in non-STEM-related fields is also addressed. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analyze projects and accompanying reflective analyses from 375 prospective teachers who created Scratch-based scripts aligned with computational processes in STEM and non-STEM subjects. Data analysis yielded a taxonomy of pedagogical strategies reflecting diverse instructional approaches. The study underscores the value of guided, discipline-specific CT activities in teacher preparation programs and highlights how script development of computational processes fosters both subject-matter understanding and computational thinking. The results suggest holistic lens in evaluating CT integration and offer evidence-based insights for embedding CT meaning-fully into teacher preparation programs across disciplines.

The aim of this work is to adapt and test, in a Brazilian public school, the ACE model proposed by Borkulo for evaluating student performance as a teaching-learning process based on computational modeling systems. The ACE model is based on different types of reasoning involving three dimensions. In addition to adapting the model and introducing innovative methodological procedures and instruments for collecting and analyzing data, our main results showed that the ACE model is superior than written tests for discriminating students on the top and bottom of the scale of scientific reasoning abilities, while both instruments are equivalent for evaluating students in the middle of the scale.

Muscular strength tests are of fundamental importance for the physiotherapeutic diagnosis and a difficult issue for learning. Also, there are very few softwares specifically developed for teaching/learning and diagnosis in the Physical Therapy area. This work describes the development and evaluation of MuStreT, an educational multimedia computer tool for Physical Therapy students. MuStreT integrates hypertext, movie clips, narrations, animations, self-evaluation questionnaires, and was inspired by the constructivism concepts. The software was developed using Unified Modeling Language concepts and implemented using animation and authoring tools. MuStreT was quantitatively evaluated by Physical Therapy students and qualitatively evaluated by Physical Therapy professionals/lecturers and Computer Science students. Results show that learning was increased using MuStreT, thanks to its interactivity potential and multimedia features. This work suggests that the use of informatics in Physical Therapy education has a great potential for improving the teaching-learning process.

The paper addresses the problem of fragmentation of the communities involved in the design of digital media for education. It draws on the experience gained at the Educational Technology Lab in the design of Logo-based microworlds with three different platforms respectively based on component computing, 3D game engines and 3D navigation with a GIS. In this paper I use the term half-baked to describe a microworld which is explicitly designed to engage its users with changing it as the main aspect of their activity. I discuss this kind of microworld as a tool for integrated design involving people with diverse expertise and/or roles to communicate. These kinds of microworlds implicitly exist within the community, but they can be explicitly designed mediated and put to use in the role of facilitators for integrated design and development to enable a growing communication amongst researchers, technicians, teachers and students. A template for presenting microworlds which was constructed through the experience with four such integrated communities is used to describe for each respective case the design principles, the affordances, the histories of development and the variety of emergent microworlds.