Practising and teaching computational thinking and debugging – a cross-disciplinary study on pre-service teachers’ reflections in Norway and Denmark

Computational thinking (CT) is becoming an important topic in teacher education as these skills are introduced into school curricula. Pre-service teachers (PSTs) need to learn CT, how to teach it, and how to lead a classroom where pupils are developing CT skills. In such settings, debugging is an important skill to both master and teach. To date, few studies on PSTs’ learning of pedagogical approaches for CT and debugging exist. Here, we present findings from interviews with PSTs on a design-based research project involving mathematics, science and technology comprehension in Norway and Denmark. The interviews contributed to the PSTs’ learning by stimulating reflections on professional practice. The PSTs focused on the new supervisory role of the teacher and on the positive characteristics of learning environments where debugging and fallibility are welcome. The PSTs recalled their own debugging strategies as involving considerable testing and re-adjusting code.