Activities with BBC micro:bit as a Foundation for Statistical Reasoning of Lower-Secondary Students

Abstract

Computational thinking is considered a set of skills necessary for living and working in today’s society. It has recently become part of mathematics curricula in several European countries. In this study, we offer a glimpse into the informal classroom where statistical reasoning and computational thinking are developed simultaneously. The student–teacher discussion was analysed and categorised. The dialogue dealt with both statistical and computational thinking. Implying from the nature of the activity, sources of errors and variation in data were discussed and ways to overcome the errors were discussed. The discussions related to computational thinking mainly addressed the work with BBC micro:bit, whether with the manipulation and hardware of the coding. A variable was used from both perspectives, as a mathematical concept and as an entity used to store the information. We identified the notion of a variable as the intersection between statistics and computational thinking.