Promoting college students’ computational thinking: the use of constructionism-based accounting spreadsheets designing activities

Abstract

AbstractComputational thinking is seen as a basic and essential skill in the 21st century, but its development issue in accounting education is still relatively limited. Therefore, anchored in Wing’s (2006) computational thinking theory, this study makes a case for developing problem-solving skills, which involve abstraction, decomposition, generalization, evaluation, and algorithmic. Given the importance of computational thinking in spreadsheets teaching, this classroom-based study aims to investigate the use of constructionism-based accounting spreadsheets designing activities to promote college students’ computational thinking in the accounting spreadsheets design context. This study used a participatory qualitative approach to investigate the phenomenon of constructing accounting spreadsheets design between students and lecturers in the classroom. Thirty-eight Accounting education majors were participants in the study. In this study, data were collected from students’ work artifacts, classroom observations, and discussion notes from college students. Referring to qualitative content analysis, findings show that constructionism-based accounting spreadsheets designing activities help the college students develop their computational thinking of spreadsheets errors or deficiencies realities found in spreadsheets design they observed. This study shows that using both constructionism activities and spreadsheets as a learning resource loaded with critical, creative, systematic, and logical thinking has the potential to promote student computational thinking in accounting spreadsheets classrooms. This study gave two main recommendations to practicioner’ accounting education, (a) when teaching the topic of accounting spreadsheets design, a lecturer must provide college students with spreadsheets errors taxonomy, and (b) in terms of activity design, spreadsheets learning should be directed to developing the college students’ computational thinking.

Keywords

• constructionism
• computational thinking
• spreadsheets design
• accounting education