This qualitative case study was designed to explore pre-service teachers' computational thinking and programming skills in an educational technology course in which block-based programming was introduced in a teacher education program. 12 teacher candidates from different subject areas participated in the study. The findings show that participants' views about computational thinking along with their programming skills evolved over the semester. They were mainly involved in pattern recognition, debugging and trial-and-error to program coding tasks. They also used simple codes within a context and implemented remixing to solve complex problems. It can be concluded that well-designed educational technology courses for programming might be effective even for pre-service teachers who are novice coders. Further research and implications for teacher education curricula will also be discussed in the seminar.

Short bio:

Duygu Umutlu is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Education and Educational Technology at Bogazici University, Turkey. As a Fulbright scholar, she received her Ph.D. in Learning, Design, and Technology program at the University of Georgia, USA. She received her M.A. degree in Educational Technology program, Bogazici University, Turkey. She has been involved in several international and national research projects so far. Her current research interests are innovative teacher education, technology integration for meaningful learning, pre-service teacher education for programming, debugging during programming, and digital adaptive scaffolding.

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