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.

Multiple choice questions are a convenient and popular means of testing beginning students in programming courses. However, they are qualitatively different from exam questions. This paper reports on a study into which types of multiple choice programming questions discriminate well on a final exam, and how well they predict exam scores.

Our future society will be different from that we have known in the last fifty years. Futurists foresee that in the near couple decades the world's community will traverse through a period of rapid technological innovations that will change the foundations of society as we used to know it (Tapscott, 1997; Wallace, 1999; Borgmann; 1999). Changes will engulf all aspects of life (Gleick, 1999). These changes will have great impact on society, work, culture and art. People will have to innovate or evaporate (Higgins, 1995). They will have to adapt continuously to never-ending permutations and engage in a never-ending adaptation.