Study to find out the perception that first year students in engineering have about the Computational Thinking skills, and to identify possible factors related to the ability of Abstraction

Abstract

Since the end of the 20th century, the digitalization of society, including the educational systems, has been growing exponentially. At the same time, education systems have been evolving towards competency-based assessment. Likewise, at the beginning of this century, the idea of Computational Thinking was resurrected by J. Wing, for solving problems and designing systems using concepts of computer science. Today, we can see how all these questions are taking shape in a new competence, called Computational Thinking, related to others that already exist. In this paper, we have studied the skills of Computational Thinking in university students, focusing on abstraction and its possible relationship with other factors. Results conclude that the students fail in relation to abstraction and in algorithmic thinking. Although the ability of abstraction is not easy to measure, a linear regression analysis has been carried out in order to determine its possible study.

Keywords

• Computational thinking
• Engineering
• Computer science
• Higher education
• Valuation methodologies
• Pedagogical issues