Computational Thinking Through Mobile Programming - A Case Study in a Liberal Education Context

Computational Thinking (CT) is considered a fundamental skill for everyone. Therefore, research has focused on defining age and grade-appropriate curricula for teaching CT. In this context, mobile programming can be a good means to foster CT. Indeed, the growing adoption of mobile devices, also among females, minorities, and all economic groups, provides a powerful opportunity for engaging students. Nevertheless, further issues need to be addressed, in particular in the context of liberal education. For example, most of the students enroll in these schools because they have higher interest for liberal arts, and perceive programming as a very difficult task. Also, issues can emerge when trying to introduce new courses into schools. In this paper, we describe a course, which aims at creating a mobile application with students having no background in software development. The main strategy to accomplish this is to foster and evaluate CT, with the support of development tools that ease the learning and application of CT skills. We report the results and the evaluation of a case study conducted in a social-economic high school, with a total of 29 students of 8\(^{th}\) and 9\(^{th}\) grade.