Research On The Cultivation Of Computational Thinking Based On Game Teaching

Computational thinking is an important concept which is widely paid attention to domestic of computer industry, as well as is needed to focus on computer education. Education researchers and scholars worldwide have started research on computational thinking and achieved certain results. In the first "nine school league (C9League) courses Seminar about basic computer"(C9Conference) held in Xi’an Jiaotong University, how to improve basic computer education under the new situation was put on the agenda, and to develop students’ computational thinking capabilities as a core mission and objectives of the computer-based teaching are identified. Developing computational thinking ability, is the need to cultivate innovative talents in the information society, and the need to culture top-notch talent with higher information literacy. Cultivating secondary school students’ computational thinking ability is a strong guarantee to future college education and occupation success.However, no specific and effective methods to cultivate computational thinking ability exist, and secondary IT education has not been paid enough attention to cultivation of computational thinking. And because of the abstract of computational thinking, there is no existing way to effectively measure the improving computational thinking ability, and there is no certain quantifiable criteria to measure the computational thinking ability, which increases the difficulty of computational thinking cultivation.For cultivating the middle school students’ computational thinking ability, the paper aims to combine computational thinking and game-based teaching, and research on computational thinking cultivation based on game teaching, to help improve the computer basic education in secondary schools. We design a computational thinking training program via game based teaching(take the secondary school IT disciplines as an example), and two practical teaching cases for cultivating computational thinking via game based teaching. In instructional design, we strive to combine computational thinking into teaching processes for the students unconsciously to apply computational thinking during gaming. Through practices, we find that combining computational thinking and game-based teaching effectively, designing game-based teaching schemes via computational thinking, we can effectively cultivate the middle school students’ computational thinking ability.The computational thinking cultivation via game-based teaching can attract students to study, enhance the students’ ability for research learning. We wish that what we have researched could contribute to improve computer-based education and cultivate innovative talents with computational thinking.