The Availability of Pedagogical Responses and the Integration of Computational Thinking.

Rapid technological advances have made computational skills more important to fully participate in society and our global economy, and as a result, computational thinking has earned attention in K–12 education as a means to preparing the future workforce. With an already congested curriculum, one approach is to integrate computational thinking into core classes that all students already take. This chapter reports on the integration of computational thinking in middle school chemistry classes. We focus on one teacher’s pedagogical strategies employed in each of the two integrated domains—in this case, computational thinking and science. We describe variations in the teacher’s approach across the two domains, noting that certain approaches to pedagogy and classroom discourse align with computational thinking. Such strategies were observed less frequently when the instruction focused on the less familiar domain of computational thinking. Second, it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that programming and computational thinking are entirely new fields for most teachers and teachers need considerable opportunity to learn this new domain to optimize its integration.

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