Computing Computational Thinking: Towards the Automatic Recognition of Computational Thinking in Real Time

Since the1990’s there have been multiple efforts to fix the broken pipeline at the K-12 level in computer science (CS) education [1-3], and most of those efforts have focused on the student motivational factor [4, 5]. The results of many studies in computer science education indicate that student motivation in computer science has been successfully increased by those efforts [4, 5], but most of them failed to rigorously assess student learning. I believe that this biased tendency of CS education research was caused by failing to have the right instrument to measure student learning of content at the semantic level. In other words, the right assessment instrument should be able to assess not only assess acquired students’ knowledge but also guide students to the next level of learning. Student learning may be measured with existing tools such as grading rubrics, but it is extremely time consuming and has a limited functionality to provide necessary educational feedback from students’ learning progressions.