Not the same: a text network analysis on computational thinking definitions to study its relationship with computer programming
Abstract
Even though countries from all over the world are modifying their national educational curriculum in order to include computational thinking skills, there is not an agreement in the definition of this ability. This is partly caused by the myriad of definitions that has been proposed by the scholar community. In fact, there are multiple examples in educational scenarios in which coding and even robotics are considered as synonymous of computational thinking. This paper presents a text network analysis of the main definitions of this skill that have been found in the literature, aiming to offer insights on the common characteristics they share and on their relationship with computer programming. As a result, a new definition of computational thinking is proposed, which emerge from the analyzed data.
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