Research On Teaching Action Of Artificial Intelligence In Secondary Vocational Schools For Training Computational Thinking

Computational thinking is one of the core literacies of information technology curriculum,and cultivating students’ computational thinking can effectively improve students’ problem-solving ability.Newly promulgated "Information Technology Curriculum Standards for Secondary Vocational Schools" in 2020 has considered computational thinking as a core literacy of IT subject,which makes exploring the cultivation path of students’ computational thinking enter a substantial stage of advancement.At the same time,the rapid development of science and technology represented by artificial intelligence technology,artificial intelligence education and programming teaching are gradually entering the IT classroom of secondary vocational school.As an important part of senior secondary education,secondary vocational education has a fundamental role in the development of modern vocational education.Therefore,it is worthwhile to study how to effectively carry out AI curriculum teaching at the secondary education stage and how to cultivate students’ computational thinking in curriculum learning.This study explored the cultivation of students’ computational thinking in the curriculum teaching of secondary vocational education "Artificial Intelligence" course through project-based learning practice.Firstly,by combing the literature related to computational thinking,project-based learning and action research,this paper clarified the concepts of computational thinking,project-based learning and action research,understood the current research status of computational thinking,project-based learning and action research,and review the theories of constructivism,cooperative learning,Dewey’s "learning by doing",situated learning.Secondly,using the questionnaire method and interview method,this paper investigated the current situation of computational thinking cultivation of secondary vocational school students.The survey results showed that there were some problems in the current computational thinking cultivation of secondary vocational school students,such as students’ weak awareness of computational thinking application,weak level of computational thinking ability,teachers’ cognitive bias of computational thinking,and single way of teaching and evaluation.Based on the research results,this paper initially constructed a project-based learning process that oriented to the cultivation of computational thinking and centered on students.Again,this paper conducts two rounds of teaching practice based on the Artificial Intelligence course with 38 students of the Internet of Things major in secondary vocational school C in City A as the action research subjects.In each round of teaching practice,through the ways of classroom observation,analysis of students’ works and student interviews,the writer understood the situation on the basis of actual teaching,summarized and reflected on the problems encountered in teaching practice,and formulated the solution to continuously improve the project-based learning process of AI course in the secondary vocational education.Finally,this paper verified the effectiveness of the project-based learning proposed in this study in cultivating students’ computational thinking by comparing the pre-and post-implementation measures of the project-based teaching in the practice classes through the computational thinking ability questionnaire.The results of the study show that:（1）it is necessary and reasonable to cultivate students’ computational thinking skills in the teaching of Artificial Intelligence course in the secondary vocational school.From the two rounds of teaching practice,we can see that the steps involved in the problem solving process of the AI course project are consistent with the elements of computational thinking,and this way of problem solving can attract students to explore more actively and internalize computational thinking into a habit of thinking in the process of exploration,which becomes a basic learning ability and problem solving method for students.（2）Project-based learning can effectively improve students’ computational thinking.Project-based learning is driven by project tasks and integrates the cultivation of computational thinking in the teaching design to improve students’ motivation and interest in learning,and students’ abilities in decomposition,generalization,abstraction,algorithm and evaluation are improved and their computational thinking skills are developed to a certain extent.