Research on the Cultivation of High School Students’ Computational Thinking Based on DBR Strategy

Abstract

In the digital age, computing thinking has become the core content of information literacy for middle school students, how to implement the strategic goal of developing middle school students' computational thinking is the key problem of middle school information technology curriculum construction. Starting from the definition and dimension of computational thinking and the characteristics of information technology courses, we discussed the feasibility of cultivating students' computational thinking in the course of information technology, and explored the convergence point between various dimensions of computational thinking and high school information technology courses, as well as the training strategy of computational thinking. Based on the characteristics and internal rules of the course "application of multimedia technology" in the course of information technology, we put forward the idea of integrating "abstract, modeling, decomposition, and synthesis" into the Photoshop (PS) module, cultivated students' computational thinking in the work design, and guided the teachers' teaching activities and students' work design with the research paradigm of design-based research (DBR), in order to enable students gradually form a deep quality of computational thinking. This study was conducted among 112 students in the second year of senior high school affiliated to Renmin University of China and involved three rounds of teaching practice. This study verified the feasibility of developing high school students' computational thinking based on information technology courses and DBR model, and formed a teaching model of cultivating high school students' computational thinking based on information technology course.