A Practical Study Of Interactive Simulation To Support The Development Of Computational Thinking In Physics Learning For High School Students

The information age has put forward new requirements for the cultivation of talents,and computational thinking is considered a necessary skill for citizens in the 21 st century.The 2017 edition of the General High School Physics Curriculum emphasises the need to enhance students’ core literacy in physics,and its provisions on "scientific thinking" and "scientific investigation"are closely related to computational thinking."Computational thinking influences the core literacies of physics,and therefore high school physics education needs to develop students’ computational thinking.Interactive simulation provides students with an interactive computer simulation environment in which they can use the simulation animations to conduct experiments,collect and process data,and construct their own physical models,thus developing their computational thinking skills.Interactive simulation technology provides a new pathway for the development of students’ computational thinking skills.This study uses literature research,educational experiments and interviews to build a computational teaching model based on philosophical,psychological and educational theories to develop students’ computational thinking skills,which consists of four stages: problem presentation,hypothesis conjecture,induction and deduction,and summary transfer.It is also based on the constructed interactive simulation-supported computational teaching model to conduct teaching activities as a way to enhance the computational thinking skills of high school students.The main work of this study includes the following four aspects.(1)To sort out and analyse relevant literature on computational thinking and interactive simulation at home and abroad.To understand the current state of research,to define the concepts of computational thinking and interactive simulation,and to elaborate on constructivist theory,Dewey’s "learning by doing" theory and contextual learning theory,so as to lay the theoretical foundation for the subsequent research.(2)Constructing computational teaching models and instructional design.Based on theories of philosophy,psychology and physics teaching,this course builds a computational teaching model and designs teaching activities based on the model,formulating teaching objectives and planning teaching content.(3)Practical study of interactive simulation to support the development of computational thinking skills.Students from two parallel classes in the first year of a high school in Jinan were selected as the subjects of the study,and experiments were carried out in the physics subject.The control class adopted the traditional lecture-based teaching,while the experimental class adopted the interactive simulation-supported computational teaching model.(4)Analysis of the effects of promoting the development of students’ computational thinking.Firstly,by distributing computational thinking ability scales and physics computational thinking test questions,as well as selecting some students for semi-structured interviews;secondly,by analysing the students’ completion of learning task sheets in the three teaching activities,the development path of students’ computational thinking was summarised.Through the above work,the following research findings were obtained from this study.(1)This study has constructed a computational teaching model that consists of four major stages: problem presentation,hypothesis prediction,inductive deduction,and summary migration,with the inductive deduction stage consisting of two sub-stages of data processing and model construction.Each stage corresponds to a different practice of computational thinking.(2)In this study,by analysing students’ performance in the last monthly physics examination and the completion of learning task sheets,it was found that students’ computational thinking was classified into four levels: excellent,good,moderate and poor,and a cross-sectional and longitudinal comparison was made between the four different levels of students.The analysis revealed that students at the excellent level had the highest computational thinking skills and students at the poor level had the lowest computational thinking skills in the same teaching activity;after going through all the teaching activities,the overall change was more obvious for students at the good and medium levels,and the improvement in computational thinking skills of students at these two levels was more significant.(3)In this study,computational teaching was used to develop students’ computational thinking skills through interactive simulation technology in high school physics teaching.The analysis of the experimental data revealed that the computational teaching mode can not only promote the improvement of students’ computational thinking skills,but also promote the improvement of students’ data processing and modelling skills in computational thinking compared with the traditional physics teaching mode.