THE ROLE OF COMPUTER SCIENCE IN DEVELOPING STUDENTS' COMPUTATIONAL THINKING: A COMPARISON OF INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE AND AZERBAIJANI SCHOOLS

The article examines the role of computer science in developing computational thinking in primary and secondary school students through an analytical literature review and compares the findings with the informatics curriculum of Azerbaijani schools. Nineteen educational technologies analysed by Ching, Hsu, and Baldwin (2018) are compared according to the computational concepts of the Brennan and Resnick (2012) framework: 18 of the tools develop the concepts of sequence and loops, while conditionals (9), events (7) and operators (7) are less represented. The Azerbaijani curriculum (2025) introduces the concepts in the order sequence, loops, conditionals, variables, treats debugging as a separate standard, and recommends the use of the Scratch family of tools. The differences are that physical manipulatives and robot kits are absent from the recommended environments, and that events and parallelism are not named as separate standards. A local study reports teacher-preparation and infrastructure problems similar to the challenges identified in the international literature.