A Qualitative Case Study: Pre-service Teachers as Novice Programmers

Authors : Burcu Şener, Duygu Umutlu

Pages : 292-318

Doi:10.18009/jcer.1435182

View : 58 | Download : 100

Publication Date : 2024-03-21

Article Type : Research

Abstract :To meet the needs of 21st-century learners in today’s classrooms, it is needed that teachers be familiar with programming and computational thinking. Particularly, subject-area pre-service teachers should be exposed to programming instruction in their teacher education programs. This case study including three participants aims to explore the process of pre-service teachers’ learning of programming while completing CT-oriented tasks through observations and interviews in a 14-week educational technology course at a public university in Turkey. The findings demonstrate that pre-service teachers, being novice programmers, prefer contextualized, structured and visually well-designed programming tasks. They use various strategies to face challenges, and the effort they put into dealing with these challenges enables them to produce higher-quality programs. Accordingly, implications for further research are also discussed in this study.
Keywords : Computer science education, programming skills, teacher education, computational thinking