BACKGROUND: In today’s world, acquiring essential skills is crucial for empowering individuals, particularly children, to handle everyday challenges and tasks in a technologically advanced society. Among these skills, computational thinking (CT) plays a vital role in problem-solving and adapting to the complex and evolving demands of the 21st century. However, it is necessary to explore the role of other thinking skills alongside CT, considering that CT cannot be improved and applied in isolation. OBJECTIVE: This paper aims to address the gap in knowledge regarding the application of systems thinking to CT development and its integration into education settings. METHODS: Results from two studies, focusing on CT development using educational robotics and maker technologies, form the basis of this paper. The research findings are synthesized and consolidated using the systemic FMA (framework of ideas, methodology, and area of concern) model. RESULTS: The research findings illustrate that utilizing a diverse set of approaches, methods, and tools can improve CT skill development across different educational settings. CONCLUSIONS: The adapted FMA model promotes methodological pluralism and facilitates a critical examination of CT development boundaries, leading to both conceptual and practical changes. This approach enables the recognition of emergent properties, the design of interventions, and the incorporation of multiple perspectives.

Computational Thinking (CT) pervasively shares its methods, practices, and dispositions across other disciplines as a new way of thinking about problem-solving. Few studies have been carried out studying CT from an Information Systems (IS) perspective. This study elaborates on how systems thinking (ST), an acknowledged theory in the IS field, bonds to CT to address some well-known common issues related to CT such as reductionism and dogmatism and to supplement the computing nature of CT with behavioral and societal facets involved in its implications. We studied how ST is applied to CT research in the literature. To do so, two primary approaches have been identified that link ST and CT. First, ST is embedded in CT practices meaning that ST is considered as a component of CT. Second, ST and CT are parallelly studied, and ST is considered as a supplementary concept to CT. Correspondingly, we propose a complementary approach that looks at CT from the ST lenses to provide a clearer picture of CT in an educational context. Moreover, we expect this new perspective can help to broaden the development of educational CT concepts and scenarios by including new notions such as framework, interpretation, norms, paradigm, and context.

In today's rapidly changing world, the acquisition of essential skills is crucial for the success of young individuals. Among these skills, computational thinking (CT) plays a vital role in problem-solving and adapting to the complex and evolving demands of the 21st century. However, there is a need to explore the integration of other thinking skills alongside CT, as well as their application in educational settings.

This study aims to address the gap in knowledge regarding the application of systems thinking to the development of CT and its integration into education. The primary objective is to explore the relationship between systems thinking and CT, providing a contextual framework for existing studies that focus on systems thinking in relation to CT. Additionally, the study explores how systems thinking can be applied to CT within educational contexts. By incorporating a systems thinking approach, a broader examination of the various factors involved in CT, including the technological landscape, individual skills and knowledge, and the social and cultural context, can be achieved.

The thesis comprises three papers that describe research efforts conducted over three years. These projects focused on CT development using educational robotics and maker technologies, aiming to build and enhance CT skills among individuals of different ages and perspectives. The findings of the research efforts are synthesized and consolidated using the systemic FMA model, a comprehensive model that interconnects the frameworks of ideas, methodology, and the area of interest. This model conceptualizes CT practices as a system encompassing emergent properties, multiple perspectives, design interventions, and social and ethical considerations. The adopted FMA model enables methodological pluralism and facilitates critical examination of the boundaries of CT development, leading to conceptual and practical changes.

The research contributes to the field of CT by providing insights into its theoretical foundations and practical applications, informing and guiding educational practices that are associated with CT. 

In many countries worldwide, Computational thinking (CT) is now considered as a fundamental skill for dealing with the challenges of the 21stcentury society. One of the most common ways of imparting CT knowledge in K-12 education is by teaching programming and coding, as it requires applying a set of concepts and practices that are essential for thinking computationally. However, learning to program can be challenging and it may take time to develop these skills in the context of school activities. Thus, complementing formal K-12 education with after-school or other types of informal learning activities aimed at fostering CT concepts and practices among young students can be an alternative approach to develop these skills. During the summer of 2021, we carried out a series of workshops in the context of a summer camp taking place at a public library, organized by a local municipality in southern Sweden. These workshops (with a total teaching duration of 20 hours in one week) consisted of activities where children aged 11-14had to assemble wheeled robots and then program them using a visual language to make them execute different types of tasks and challenges. The outcomes of our study show that roughly one third of the participants managed to program the robots with code that made use of CT core concepts, such as conditionals, loops, and logical operators, among others. The rest of the children did not manage to successfully apply these concepts and thus they could only manage to program sequential linear scripts. We argue that learning to program and understanding some of the main concepts, which are for the most part very abstract, is a process that takes time and thus, extracurricular activities can be an effective method to complement formal education and help young students develop their CT and programming skills.

Digital competence is a skill associated with the 21- century abilities essential to contribute to today’s and tomorrow’s digital and technical environments. Computational Thinking (CT), which is a thought process for problem-solving, is one of the emerging trends that make up digital competence. In our explorative study, we have used educational robotics with four pre-service teachers during their four- week s placement at different preschools. We applied three distinct and complementary approaches to design and conduct this study: Systems Thinking (ST); Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge; and Computing Pedagogy. Our findings are categorized in two main perspectives: pre-service teachers and children. In the pre-service teachers' perspective, the participants indicated that their educational program lacks specific content and activities related to digital competence, CT, and programming. Despite the initial pre-service teachers’ thoughts on improvement of children's CT concepts, the findings show that CT practices such as collaboration and trial and error were developed. From the children’s perspective, the empirical findings illustrate that digital competence and CT development vary depending on the age of the children; whereas logical thinking and pattern recognition are skills that were present along the whole age range of children (ages 2-6), other CT skills like algorithmic thinking were developed among older children only (aged 5-6). We learned that an ST approach can behelpful, as multiple factors are involved in the practice. It reveals the underlying features of the situation that emerge when components of the system interact with each other.

One major challenge the educational community is facing relates to how to effectively integrate computational thinking (CT) concepts and ideas into a particular school curriculum. Acquiring CT-skills by means of STEM offers rich opportunities within students ́ education which may lead to learning gains. Previous research has shown that, to maximize the appeal and potential of CT learning environments, a precondition must be set first. The materials used must invite problem-based, inquiry-based and self-discovery learning, must be used without creating misconceptions and, above all, must give students the opportunity to acquire knowledge that can be directly transferred to everyday practice in an accessible manner. All the above puts demands on teachers who carry out learning and teaching in these environments. The EU funded TACTIDE project has tried to incorporate relevant curricular components into a coherent task, implementing assignments and challenges across different subjects and curricula of three different European countries. Based on the analysis of each national curricula, common topics have been identified and sub-scenarios have been developed. These sub-scenarios have been conceived to promote the integration between the topics mediated by CT. To achieve this objective, a greenhouse scenario has been conceptualized and designed towards teaching CT, by the use of microcontrollers such as the BBC micro :b it and the Calliope Mini, as an overarching STEM-topic. Using available sub-scenarios, a Moodle-course for teachers was developed for daily school activities to which other subjects in the core curriculum were interconnected in order to integrate CT skills and abilities. Scalability across different school levels and heterogeneous groups of learners, especially focusing prior knowledge, have been considered important design elements.

The 2nd Linnaeus Student Conference on Information Technology (LSCIT) was held for two days between September 24 and September 25, 2020 in the Växjö campus of Linnaeus University. There were also online participants from different countries as well as different parts of Sweden.

Computational thinking (CT) is a set of problem-solving methods which several scholars advocate for its inclusion in the educational curricula for K-12. Incorporating this knowledge into existing syllabuses is a challenge for both the educational community and researchers within the field of STEM education. The focus of this study is on the importance of co-design and constructionism in the process of planning and designing teaching modules to introduce students to CT using both robotic constructions and programming. This paper presents and discusses the design process of a series of workshops conducted with a group of middle school students during the fall of 2020. The main goal of these workshops was to introduce students to the main concepts and practices of CT, thus addressing the goals defined by the Swedish Agency for Education (Skolverket). Our initial findings indicate that co-designing educational activities (with a focus on constructionism and challenge-based learning) in close collaboration between teachers and researchers can lead to effective ways to foster the development of CT skills among students.

Many countries have started to integrate Computational Thinking (CT) as an essential 21st century skill into different schools’ STEM related subjects. Despite positive developments in terms of CT integration into schools’ curricula, there are still important issues and challenges to address on how to teach and use programming and CT in the classrooms. As part of our ongoing efforts to introduce and to apply different maker technologies to foster CT, this paper describes the results of an exploratory study aiming at designing and implementing learning activities in informal settings using the Engino® Robotics Platform (ERP) and the BBC micro:bit. We conducted a one-week-long workshop with the participation of 22 children aged 10-15 years old. The constructionist theoretical perspective and the Four P’s Creative Learning theory (projects, peers, passion, and play) were applied for conceptualizing and designing our activities. The initial results of our efforts indicate that firstly, learning contexts enriched by the combination of different maker technologies can help students to develop CT skills; Secondly, remixing learning experiences can bring CT into STEM subjects; and lastly, the design of the proposed workshop and the planned activities serve as the basis of a learning environment that can foster problem solving, creativity, and heart-ware skills when the four P's are taken into account. The current study contributes with empirical knowledge that can be used for the advancement of design practices to promote CT development in connection to STEM-related subjects both in informal and formal learning settings.

The 1st Linnaeus Student Conference on Information Technology (LSCIT) was held for two days between September 26 and September 27, 2019 in the Växjö campus of Linnaeus University. There were also online participants from different countries as well as different parts of Sweden.