Dra. Seckel-Santis, María

The advance of society and technological development have led governments to transform their public policies in various areas, with a particular focus on the education system. In this context, many countries have focused their efforts on raising educational quality standards, especially in the development of digital competencies. This has generated the need to modify school curricula, incorporating Computational Thinking (CT) in areas such as mathematics. Several researches highlight the importance of providing tools to teachers to design meaningful pedagogical strategies that integrate mathematical thinking with CP, implementing innovative teaching practices that favor the development of skills in students. In line with these demands, the present research aims to design an instrument for the observation of mathematics classes that incorporate the PC through the programming of robots, in order to guide teaching reflection. The study is situated within an interpretive paradigm, with a mixed approach, and validates the content from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. In conclusion, the instrument designed has proven to be a useful tool to guide teacher reflection, as it is structured in six key dimensions and has been validated in terms of clarity, coherence and relevance. However, the need was identified to add additional items to improve the sufficiency of some dimensions. Finally, a second validation process is suggested to ensure its reliability and applicability in different educational contexts.

The social, scientific and technological development of recent years has encouraged the incorporation of computational thinking in the school curriculum of various countries progressively, starting from early childhood education. This research aims to characterize future kindergarten teachers’ traits of didactic-mathematical and computational knowledge presented when solving and posing robotics problems. Firstly, aspects of the mathematical and computational knowledge of the participants (97 students of the subject of Didactics of Mathematics of the Degree in Early Childhood Education at a Spanish university) were identified when they solved problems as users of the Blue-Bot didactic robot. Secondly, we analyzed their justifications for reflecting on the design of robotics problems. The results indicate that future teachers present characteristics of didactic mathematical knowledge when solving and designing robotics problems, although errors and am- biguities are evident, especially in the procedures and representations of the programming. These shortcomings significantly influence the didactic suitability of the robotics problems they design. From a future perspective, in the training of future teachers, it is considered relevant to incorporate didactic-mathematical and computational knowledge that allows them to develop logical, spatial and computational thinking.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the reflections of future kindergarten teachers when designing didactic sequences with the use of the bee-bot robot. A qualitative methodological design was followed to achieve this objective, collecting the data through a written record prepared by the participants from collaborative work. A total of 25 future teachers participated, forming six working groups. The data were analyzed with the content analysis technique, considering the criteria of didactic suitability–epistemic, cognitive, interactional, mediational, affective, and ecological–and their respective components. The results suggest that at the moment prior to the design of the didactic sequences, the reflections of the groups of future teachers are related only to some criteria, while, in the design of the proposed teaching and learning process, the units of analysis were related to all six criteria. With the results obtained, it is concluded that a future implementation and observation of the design of didactic sequences by the participants would allow the participants to consider more components of the criteria when reflecting. In addition, it is concluded that training that contemplates the criteria of didactic suitability, would also allow future teachers to deepen their reflections, guiding them with these tools.