The Development of a Board Game to Enhance Computational Thinking Skill and Motivation in Computer Programming Course for Undergraduate Students
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Abstract
Computational Thinking is the most important skill in the digital disruptive era, which is rapidly changing and has radical implications for the skills needed in the future. Thus, the purposes of this study were to design and develop a board game to enhance computational thinking skills for undergraduate students, to investigate computational thinking, and to investigate the relationship between computational thinking, achievement scores and motivation in computer programming course. The one-group pretest–posttest pre-experimental design was employed in this study. The sample group in this research was 30 first- and second-year students of electronics and telecommunication technical education at Rajamangala University of Technology Isan, Khon Kaen Campus, which were selected by simple random sampling. The results revealed that the quality of the board game evaluated by experts was at good level (=4.02, S.D.=0.47). The investigation of computational thinking revealed that students had a good level of computational thinking (79.73%). It was found that the computational thinking consisted of the following four elements: decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithm design. There was a positive correlation between computational thinking and achievement scores (r=0.802). Furthermore, students' motivation in learning the computer programming course was at moderate level (
=3.17, S.D.=0.92) higher than before studying the course where they had a low level of motivation (
=2.47, S.D.=0.86). The findings imply that the board game might be used as supplementary material for improving students' achievement, computational thinking, and motivation in learning a computer programming course.
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