Assessing Computational Thinking in CS Unplugged Activities

Computer Science (CS) Unplugged activities have been deployed in many informal settings to present computing concepts in an engaging manner. To justify use in the classroom, however, it is critical for activities to have a strong educational component. For the past three years, we have been developing and refining a CS Unplugged curriculum for use in middle school classrooms. In this paper, we describe an assessment that maps questions from a comprehensive project to computational thinking (CT) skills and Bloom's Taxonomy. We present results from two different deployments and discuss limitations and implications of our approach.

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