Case 04 — The Coding Education Boom and Computational Thinking Literacy
Overview
| Item | Content |
|---|---|
| Period | Hour of Code 2013; expansion of elementary/secondary SW education mid-2010s |
| Technology | Block coding (Scratch 2007→2010s), kits (Arduino, etc.) |
| Literacy | Procedural thinking, problem decomposition, debugging, understanding automation |
Transition Point
2000s Logo (felt like a specialist language) → 2010s coding by snapping blocks together. The discourse shifted from “a coder’s specialist skill” → “a thinking tool for every student”. In Korea, this was the period when the 2015 revised curriculum strengthened informatics and SW education.
Literacy Improvement Mechanisms
- Problem decomposition: Breaking big tasks into small commands
- Loops and conditionals: Expressing rules as symbols
- Debugging: Reading errors, forming hypotheses, and fixing them
- Society of automation: Deciding what to hand to machines and what people should do
Field Operation Tips
- Use Scratch or paper blocks to diagram the program’s operational flow as code
- Debugging game: “Fix an intentionally broken procedure”
- Output: one mini program of your own, or a block diagram of the activity procedure
Implications for Paju Activist Training
- Coding is not the goal — it is the same thinking used for designing experience-program procedures
- A single session can be built with free tools, no hardware kits needed
- Introduce it as problem-solving sense, not SW gifted programs or olympiads
Notes
- From Logo (see 2000 folder case) to block coding: the tool got easier, the thinking stayed the same