Teaching Design And Application Of Comprehension Of Computational Concepts For Junior High School Students Supported By Visual Programming Tools

With the increasing development of modern computer technology,computing thinking has become a necessary skill for social talents in the 21 st century,which has been highly valued by people from all walks of life.As one of the core contents of computing thinking teaching,computing concept has also been valued by the majority of front-line information technology educators.In order to promote students’ understanding of computing concepts and effectively improve students’ computing thinking ability,some researchers focus on selecting appropriate learning scaffolds and evaluating students’ programming learning process.In junior middle school,the popularity of Python programming course provides a suitable learning environment for junior middle school students’ understanding of computing concepts.However,the high abstraction of computing concepts leads to difficulties in understanding computing concepts for some junior middle school students,and there is an urgent need for appropriate learning scaffolds to assist the understanding of concepts.As a common learning support in the field of programming teaching,visual programming tools have attracted more and more researchers’ attention.Firstly,this study combs the relevant literature on visual programming tools and computing concepts,mainly including the development of visual programming tools and their application in teaching,research status,methods and ways of understanding computing concepts,so as to lay a foundation for follow-up research;Secondly,it constructs the visual teaching framework of python,which supports the classification of computing concepts and the analysis of computing concepts;Finally,under the guidance of the classification framework and teaching mode,the teaching design is carried out.According to the teaching design,the teaching experiment is carried out in a python classroom of a middle school,and the experimental data such as students’ works and calculation of concept test scores are collected.Through the above work,this study has achieved a number of results.Firstly,the visual programming tool constructed in this study supports the teaching mode of computing concept understanding and the teaching design under its guidance.It can effectively integrate the visual programming tool into the python classroom and achieve good teaching results;Secondly,after investigation,it is found that students also recognize visual programming tools.Students have high enthusiasm for programming with visual programming tools and can actively participate in the classroom;Finally,through the analysis of experimental data,it can be concluded that visual programming tools can effectively promote the understanding of computing concepts,and provide a new idea for the later programming teaching.