Computational Thinking has evolved to a subject of great interest in all areas of education. The last three years have witnessed an explosive growth of initiatives, studies and even literature reviews. Yet, most of computational thinking is still focused on pre-college levels and not many studies have investigated it within engineering education at the college level. In this context, our work constitutes a spearheading effort and advances the current state of knowledge.
During the fourth year of this project, the major result has been the dissemination efforts taking place. That is, our diagnostic has been okayed by the Technology Transfer offices at the institutions in the collaborative and a website has been launched. Also, during past conferences and professional meetings, a number of institutions have expressed interest in utilizing the recently validated ECTD. This also opens opportunity to engage in another validation cycle with even a more diverse pool of participants, thus getting our instrument better calibrated for extended audiences.
Another major result is the publication of the earlier work on enculturation that has produced a secondary study on factors of enculturation where computational thinking has gained highlighted attention given its difficulty among engineering students. An instrument on enculturation that considers computational thinking as one of its constructs is getting validated.
We have also engaged in conversations with our IRB to obtain access to DFQWI students. The result has not been what we have anticipated, and we are taking alternative steps to reach participants. At the time this abstract is written, a different IRB revision is getting drafted utilizing a snow-ball technique (aka referrals) of potential students who might have dropped, withdrawn or transferred. We are also preparing the longitudinal study to take place at the end of the Fall 2023 semester and beginning of Spring 2024. The expectation is that we complete the last objective in our funded grant, the development of computational thinking skills over time in engineering students. We also expect to correlate the findings of this project with the enculturation project.
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