Pathways of computing education: Formal and informal approaches

Today, computing is becoming gradually more essential to our society. In many countries, it has been introduced into compulsory schooling (K−12) education, including in the form of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathe matics) education. Manches and Plowman (2017) argue that computing education should be introduced to children from an early age. Computing is often taught in schools in the form of computational thinking (CT), which is about expressing solutions as algorithms or computational steps that can be executed using a computer (CSTA 2016). CT is advocated as a universal competence that can prepare children for future challenges in a growing digital world (Voogt et al. 2015). It is defined by Wing (2006) as “solving prob lems, designing systems, and understanding human behaviour, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science” (33). In computing education, the definition of CT has two aims—(1) learning transferable knowledge from computing that can be utilized in everyday life and (2) employing computing concepts to promote computing work in other subjects (Guzdial 2015). The ideas of programming and algorithms that are mostly used to assess CT in K−12 computing education include variables, modularity, control, and algorithms (Alves, Von Wangenheim, and Hauck 2019).