Physics Teachers’ Motivations to Learn Computational Thinking as a Re-novicing Experience

Abstract

Integrating computational thinking (CT) into high school physics requires physics teachers to develop specialized pedagogical content knowledge of computing and content integration. We describe this as a re-novicing experience, in which teachers build and act upon knowledge at the intersection of physics, computation, and pedagogy. We observed this re-novicing in a Python workshop for physics teachers (n = 23) from three countries. Teachers participated in computational learning activities in Jupyter Notebooks with the goal of developing their capacity to integrate Python in physics applications. In this exploratory study, we describe a framework for integrated CT professional learning and report teacher responses to a post-workshop survey about their motivations for participating in this re-novicing process. Their motivations included needing to learn essential programming features and an intrinsic motivation to transform how they teach physics. These findings suggest that professional learning for CT integration needs to interweave computing content with pedagogical applications.