Bringing computational thinking to non-STEM undergraduates through an integrated notebook application

ABSTRACT

Computational thinking courses are no longer exclusive to engineering and computer science students in higher education but have become a requirement in other fields, as well as for students in secondary, primary, and even early childhood education. Computational notebooks, such as Jupyter, are popular solutions to develop the programming skills typically introduced in these courses. However, these solutions often require technical infrastructure and lack support for rich educational experiences that integrate discussion, active feedback, and learning analytics. In this paper, we introduce a web application designed to address these challenges. We present blended learning scenarios supported by this application and evaluate them in an eight-week computational thinking course comprising 67 students pursuing a Bachelor in Business and Economics. We include in our results the impact of the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced a move from blended to online distance learning for the second half of our evaluation. © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).