Education and the Future: Computational Thinking as an Educational Policy

If we continued through the recent history of education, we would see that at every stage technology acted as the great articulator of the future. The fascination with the space race of the 70s, the cybernetic optimism of the 80s, the personal computer in the 90s, the internet access of the 2000s, the expansion of the cell phone in these years: the technological imagination imposes a state of mind that intervenes in education, school, the classroom. But how much of that actually goes down to the classroom? Do we always mean the use of devices when we talk about technology? In what way does the computer — the idea of the computer — structure our thinking?

These were some of the ideas that were discussed at the International Conference on Education and Future organized by the Ticmas platform in Montevideo, with the intention of addressing the different strategies that pursue educational transformation in the country. With the presence of more than twenty referents, panels, debates, interviews, presentations, activities and practices were held. Among the guests was Emiliano Pereiro, head of the Computational Thinking area of Plan Ceibal, who participated in an interview with Patricio Zunini, where he told about the project he is carrying out.

Emiliano Pereiro holds a degree in Sociology from the University of the Republic (Uy) and a Master's Degree in Educational Policy from the Torcuato di Tella University (Arg.). He is currently the head of the Computational Thinking area of the Ceibal Plan of Uruguay. In 2016 he co-founded the Pansophia project, a space with Argentine colleagues to think about the future of education. He has been invited as a speaker by UNESCO, The Autonomous University of Mexico and the research and innovation laboratory in Education for Latin America and the Caribbean, SUMMA. Activist for the introduction of Computational Thinking and Artificial Intelligence in the educational systems of our region.

— How is a computational thinking program promoted in schools?

—We are celebrating five years of the Computational Thinking program in Ceibal. It has been a long iterative process; we have changed the modality of the program quite a bit. Today we have a consolidated program that works in 60% of Uruguayan public schools. It is a voluntary program: teachers sign up to participate at the beginning of the year, and more are enrolled every year. Now we reach 2,000 groups, which is equivalent to about 40,000 children. We work with a model that Ceibal started in English, and it is with a remote teacher who knows the programming language and, through the videoconferencing equipment installed in schools, works together with the classroom teacher in a pedagogical pair. We work on it in an interdisciplinary way.

— How do you approach the work?

—We work on specific concepts of computational thinking with other areas of knowledge. We work on projects that last between eight and ten weeks — which means that there are between three and four projects in the year — to reach solutions through computational thinking. We work on concepts such as what an algorithm is, how to work with algorithms and abstractions. And it is done with Mathematics, with Language, but also with Art, with artificial intelligence. It has a very good impact on the teaching community. Because this is built by the teaching community from the bottom up. We provide the tools for them to carry it forward.

— Ceibal has always been advanced and the Computational Thinking program has been going on for five years: how did they realize that it was necessary to start developing it?

—Ceibal was always a cutting-edge organization. Let's think it was created in 2007. To give you an idea, in 2007 the first iPhone came out. At that time there was a change in technology, and in recent years — five, seven, eight years — digitalization has had a tremendous impact on the world. The pandemic accelerated it even more. Today we are surrounded by algorithms. Think about how many algorithms you crossed paths with from the time you got up until you came here: all the time we are interacting with algorithms that influence our decisions. It is important for our students to be able to problematize and understand what an algorithm is, understand how it works, how it impacts their lives. At the same time, it is important that you develop programming skills, and that you let yourself be influenced by some tertiary career option linked to technology, which is something that is lacking in our countries. We have a large deficit in the region. Those are great reasons to start working on the subject.

— How is the success of the program measured? What are the evaluation criteria?

—It's a great question because computational thinking is something new. The literature has changed in recent years; progress has been made on the subject and this also means that there are few standardized assessment instruments to measure it. We, then, have several instances of evaluation. We do a survey at the end of the year with the teachers to see what they value about the program and the learning of the children, and they really give us very positive numbers. In the latter, 94% of the teachers would recommend to a colleague to work with the program and 97% were happy with the learning and motivation of the children. That, in what has to do with an evaluation of processes.

— And in the evaluation of learning?

—We also have a learning assessment line, especially since it is something that is advancing in the world. The next edition of Pisa will measure computational thinking with mathematics. Within the Uruguayan education system there is a platform called SEA, which is the evaluation platform, and there we have our assessments to measure what was learned in each module of computational thinking. And we also have an even more ambitious project, which is an adaptive test of computational thinking. But that's for the longer term.

— You were just saying that computational thinking can be implemented with any discipline. What is it like to implement it, for example, in Literature? I don't want to oppose technology and literature, but, in any case, computational thinking can be more easily linked to the exact subjects.

“Totally. That's true. One associates computational thinking with engineering, with science, but it is clearly a skill that can be worked on in social matters. In computational thinking we work from the logic of programming to solve some kind of problem, using the power of the computer. Computational power can be applied to social problems. Everything that has to do with data analysis is done with a computer: we work in data analysis. And we also work from literature. We have a proposal called “Write Your Own Adventure” that refers to those books from when we were young in which we were choosing pages and adventures. So the challenge is for the kids to write and program an ending where they have to choose different paths. The end result is a product, a programming they do in a language called Scratch, which is designed for children, with which they think a story with different endings.

— What are the expectations you expect to develop in the next five years?

—We hope to universalize the program. We are convinced that it is a skill at the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution that every student must have to be a full citizen in the 21st century. We are twenty-five people working on the program. There is a pedagogical area, which is led by an engineer who works together with other engineers, with teachers, that takes an R&D perspective — research and development is a discussion to be given in education. We work from there thinking pedagogical content and what we are doing is proposing content for the first cycle and also for secondary school. Try to reach the entire education system so that children become familiar with the skill and later can deepen it in computer science.

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