Research On The Design And Practice Of Gamified Task-driven Visual Programming Instruction

At present,the cultivation of computational thinking is at a younger age.However,the cultivation of computational thinking in primary school is still in its initial stage.The cultivation of computational thinking still needs more teaching research and practice.The author takes the primary school students as the research object to carry out teaching design and practice,in order to improve the computational thinking ability of primary school students.First of all,through consulting and researching the relevant literature on the cultivation of computational thinking,we understand the research status of visual programming,computational thinking,computational thinking teaching and computational thinking evaluation.Combining the three-dimensional framework of computational thinking proposed by MIT Media Lab（computational concept,computational practice,computational concept）and the mapping relationship between this framework and cognitive level proposed by Jiang Qiang et al.,a new evaluation framework of computational thinking is proposed.Based on this framework,the class observation of Scratch creative programming class was carried out to evaluate which aspects of students’ computational thinking ability needed to be improved.A questionnaire on the learning status of computational thinking concepts was prepared for pre-testing.The teaching status of Scratch creative programming class was understood through interviews with teachers.Based on the above investigation,we find the following problems:First,programming teaching lacks systematic curriculum design,and teaching objectives are unclear;Second,teachers only pay attention to the training of programming knowledge and skills in the process of teaching,ignoring the training of computing thinking ability;Third,students’ computational thinking ability is generally at a low level,and the teacher-centered teaching mode restricts the students’ computational thinking level to a higher level.In order to solve the above problems,this study designed student-centered game-based task-driven instructional design,scaffolding teaching strategy and conceptual metaphor intervention measures to help students improve the level of computational thinking,and put it into practice in the class.Through questionnaire,analysis of students’ works,interviews with students,and classroom observation,the students were evaluated to see whether their ability of computing concept,computing practice,and computing concept had been improved.The analysis of teaching effect shows that students have a deeper understanding of the seven computing concepts of sequence,cycle,parallelism,event,condition,operator and data.In the dimension of computing practice,the students’ high-level thinking level of "analysis","evaluation" and "creation" has been improved,but there is still room for improvement.In the dimension of computing concept,the level of "connection" has been greatly improved,but the two levels of "expression" and "questioning" have not been significantly improved,which requires a long time of cultivation.