Investigating The Elementary School Students' Skills Of Computational Thinking And Self-Efficacy Through A Robot Programming Project

This study designed a project-based programming learning activity,"robot rescue," aimed at cultivating the computational thinking ability of elementary school students and improving their sense of self-efficacy in programming.It allows students to find problems and solve them collaboratively in the process of self-exploration.It also helps them develop an interest in learning programming.The entire project-based activity was designed in five stages;1)defining a problem,2)exploring a possible solution,3)collecting relevant information,4)attempting to solve the problem,and 5)presenting the results.The participants were 41 fifth and sixth graders at Liyang Foreign Language School in Jiangsu.There were 20 students in the experimental group and 21 in the control group.The experimental group carried out the programming learning activity of the "robot rescue" project,while the control group received traditional programming instruction.Pre-experimental testing and post-test testing of two class students about computational thinking and self-efficacy in programming.This study used methods for data analysis:paired samples t-test,one-way ANCOVA,and Johnson-Neyman.The 16-week instructional intervention examined the impact of project-based learning model and traditional classroom teaching model on pupils' computational thinking and self-efficacy in programming.The analysis of the results revealed that the PBL did not show any significant difference in students" computational thinking;however,the PBL teaching model enhanced their self-efficacy in programming.Finally,the paper discusses the research results and suggests possible areas of future research,such as elementary school project-based learning or programming instruction.