The Fourth International Conference on Computational Thinking Education 2020 went online from 19 – 21 August. CEL’s director Marcus Specht provided one of the Keynote speeches.
In his speech “Computational Thinking, why is it important and when to learn what?" he discussed some background on programming education and the embedding of programming education mainly in secondary and higher education. Giving examples of learning programming in higher education and what the relation to underlying concepts and the different facets of computational concepts to the actual use in the BSc and MSc studies are.
The embedding of CT concepts in higher education in that sense is related to questions of student motivation, task and assignment design, as also changes towards a digital curriculum. The talk concluded with reflection on lessons learned on important components for building sustainable student motivation for using computational means in their study and later job.
Recordings of the speech will be published online. Proceedings of the conference are already available.