Design And Practice Of Unplugged Teaching Activities In Elementary School For The Development Of Computational Thinking

With the development of society,computational thinking has become a necessary basic literacy in the 21 st century.The country also pays more and more attention to the cultivation of computational thinking.2022 promulgated the "Compulsory Education Information Technology Curriculum Standards" clearly put forward the goal of cultivating computational thinking for students at all stages of compulsory education.And the cultivation of computational thinking in elementary school at the present stage in China is relatively single,mostly in the form of programming.However,there are some problems with programming teaching,such as the lack of flexibility in teaching methods and the high requirements for hardware equipment.Unplugged teaching activities are designed to stimulate students’ learning motivation through tangible materials,such as interactive games,so that students can learn computer science knowledge and develop computational thinking skills in game activities,and lay the foundation for subsequent plug-in programming learning.Therefore,this paper addresses how to design and implement unplugged teaching activities to enhance students’ computational thinking,and to verify their effectiveness through teaching practice in elementary schools.Through literature analysis,this study defines the concepts of computational thinking and unplugged instructional activities,and summarizes the current status of the development of computational thinking and the current status of research on unplugged instructional activities at home and abroad.The study was guided by Piaget’s cognitive development theory,Dewey’s "learning by doing" theory,game-based learning theory,and contextual learning theory,and used literature analysis,action research,questionnaire survey,and interview method to carry out the activities.Through the case comparison and analysis of unplugged teaching activities and visual programming teaching,the advantages and disadvantages of unplugged teaching activities and visual programming are summarized.According to the goal of cultivating computational thinking at elementary school level,summarize the problems of unplugged teaching activities for cultivating computational thinking and the design principles,and design the evaluation of the activities.Analyze learner characteristics,activity content,and activity goals,design the flow of unplugged teaching activities for fostering computational thinking in elementary school students according to the 5E teaching model,conduct unplugged teaching activity design,conduct action research,and summarize and reflect on problems at the end of each round of action research and improve them in the next round of action research.Computational thinking test questions,learning motivation questionnaires and interviews were administered to students before and after the study.The results of the test questions,self-evaluation of classroom performance,learning motivation questionnaire scores,and interview results were analyzed for data,thus verifying the effectiveness of the unplugged teaching activities designed for the cultivation of computational thinking in elementary schools,and summarizing the optimization strategies and room for innovation of unplugged teaching activities for the cultivation of computational thinking in elementary school IT curriculum.The results of the study showed that students’ test scores and learning motivation improved through the unplugged teaching activities,indicating that the unplugged teaching activities can stimulate students’ learning motivation and have a certain effect on the improvement of students’ computational thinking.Finally,we summarize the main research contents,innovations and shortcomings of this study.The following suggestions are made for the future development of unplugged teaching activities:(1)developing reference books for unplugged teaching activities in domestic elementary school;(2)enriching the evaluation methods of unplugged teaching activities;and(3)developing a learning course for teachers of unplugged teaching.We hope to provide some references for the subsequent development of unplugged teaching activities.