The Global Challenge of Designing E-learning Tools for Computational Thinking: A Comparison Between East Asia and Scandinavia

In this paper we investigate status and trends in the pedagogy of Computational Thinking (CT), in Scandinavia and Eastern Asian countries. A more detailed comparison is drawn between two specific countries: Denmark and Taiwan. Combining a literature review on official information about the implementation of this new subject in schools, interviews with experts and practitioners, we identify core aspects in the pedagogy of CT across sociocultural differences, such as: the role and relation between formal and non-formal learning, the relation between CT and other school subjects, coding as an unavoidable part of CT as a subject, the tendency to adopt and adapt globally shared materials originally imported from the North American educational discourse. We also noticed that in Danish primary and secondary schools, current orchestration strategies in CT-related learning activities tend to leverage hands-on tinkering, peer-learning, and collaborative/group-based problem-solving; similar strategies are adopted in Taiwanese clubs. In this respect, we identify a lack of support for group work in existing e-learning tools for coding. Our main contribution is the definition of a scenario and requirements for a new class of e-learning tools, capable of supporting group-based CT learning activities across different culture. We are currently organizing a series of observations of the teaching practices of coding within CT, in cooperation with our network of contacts in Taiwan and Japan. Future work involves the development of a prototype of the new e-learning tool, iteratively, involving experts from Scandinavia and East Asia.