engleski

GAMES FOR LEARNING ALGORITHMIC THINKING (GLAT) PROJECT: PERCEIVED FACTORS ACCOUNTING FOR TEACHER ACCEPTANCE AND USAGE OF A NEW LEARNING SCENARIOS DESIGN TOOL – THE LEPLANNER

Training students to be critical thinkers has become essential in today’s education. GLAT (Games for Learning Algorithmic Thinking) is an Erasmus funded institutional partnership project that seeks to prepare teachers with innovative teaching skills to achieve the feat of teaching coding. Teachers drawn from schools in Croatia were trained in innovative teaching and learning practices to acquire programming and critical thinking skills to facilitate the teaching of coding in schools. In this paper a descriptive overview of the perceptions of the teachers participating in the project are explored in the dimensions of a) digital self-efficacy, b) Digital/ICT Usage, c) the digital supports in their schools, the perceived usefulness and the actual use of LePlanner – a new tool introduced ; and further explore how the age of the teachers could influence the perceptions they hold. The study was organized as an online survey for purposively sampled subjects who were non-ICT teachers. In all 24 teachers participated in the survey. Most teachers had an above average perception rating across all the five variables that were measured. The responses were homogeneous implying shared perceptions by teachers. However, the study discovered two cluster groupings: Cluster 1 ; had 16 members (66.7% of the sample) ; Cluster 2, had 8 members, (33.3% of the sample) ; the clusters did not display exclusive age groupings. Hence, age could not be argued as an influencing factor for determining how far the teachers will be successful in their new roles as programming teachers. Nonetheless, a total of 66.7% of the teachers seemed to require some form of attention in the light of their Digital/Computer Selfefficacy and school-based support perceptions towards the usage of digital tools and the acceptance of the LePlanner. GLAT is an ongoing project, therefore subsequent workshops would factor in training components that will address the concerns of the teachers.

Games for Learning Algorithmic Thinking, GLAT, Computation thinking, Learning Scenarios design, LePlanner, Game-based Learning, Project Based Learning, Inquiry

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