Introducing micro:bit in Swedish primary schools - An empirical design research on developing teaching material for training computational thinking in Swedish primary schools

Abstract

During the 21st century there has been an increasing interest in the field of computational thinking, a popular way of teaching students about programming. In a society with an ever faster technical development it becomes more relevant to educate future generations about the technology that surrounds us. Many different platforms can be used for this purpose, e.g Scratch, Raspberry Pi or Arduino. In the UK the platform micro:bit has been used in schools since 2016. Other countries are now also incorporating programming in their curriculum, and Sweden is set to incorporate this by the 1st of July 2018. This thesis examines what may be important to consider when designing teaching materials with the micro:bit for training Swedish primary school students’ computational thinking skills. This was done through an iterative design process, by conducting 21 workshops with the goal to support Swedish primary school teachers with micro:bit teaching materials. The result of this thesis consists of 9 individual parts, presented in 4 groups, mapped along an axis of abstraction. A model was created in an attempt to communicate observed relationships between students learning potential, their risk of feeling overwhelmed and the amount of choices they were provided with. A set of guidelines as well as a teaching approach was provided to give more concrete answers to the research question. Practical workshop examples were also provided in an attempt to aid teachers in the transition to the new curriculum.