MIT App Inventor: Objectives, Design, and Development

Abstract

In recent years, Computational Thinking (CT) Education for K-12 stu- dents and undergraduates has become an important and hotly discussed issue. In Tai- wan, starting from August 2019, all students in secondary schools will be required to be fostered with computational thinking competencies. This chapter discusses not only the preparation of students to learn CT but also the preparation required for teachers and principals. There will be six credits each for the compulsory education of information technology and living technology in junior high schools. Integrating CT into other courses, such as mathematics, is one of the approaches implemented at the primary school level. This chapter explores an initiative in which teachers integrated block-based programming into a mathematics course for the sixth-grade students, and further studied the self-efficacies and motivations of the students while they learn CT in the integrated course. The chapter also reports on investigations of the attitudes of educational leaders, such as the K-12 principals, towards teacher preparation for conducting CT education in their schools. The results of the study indicate that the weakest part of the object readiness (facilities) in 2017 in Taiwan was the availability ofclassrooms for maker activities from the perspectives of the K- 12 principals. In terms of human resource readiness, instructional material resource readiness, and leadership support (management readiness), teachers and principals scored readiness degree at more than three points but less than four points on a five-point Likert scale, implying that there is still room in all these aspects to be enhanced. Many teacher training courses will need to be carried out in the next 1 to 2 years because the technological and pedagogical content knowledge of the teachers regarding CT education must continue to be strengthened.