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The article examines the modern computer-based educational environment and the requirements of the possible cognitive interface that enables the learner’s cognitive grounding by incorporating abductive reasoning into the educational process. Although the main emphasis is on cognitive and physiological aspects, the practical tools for enabling computational thinking in a modern constructionist educational environment are discussed. The presented analytical material and developed solutions are aimed at education with computers. However, the proposed solutions can be generalized in order to create a computer-free educational environ-ment. The generalized paradigm here is pragmatism, considered as a philosophical assumption. By designing and creating a pragmatist educational environment, a common way of organizing computational thinking that enables constructionist educational solutions can be found.

The introduction of the new Informatics curriculum in the Netherlands in 2019 raises the need for new teaching material that includes practical assignments and guidelines for their assessment. As a part of our research project on teaching Computational Science (modeling and simulation), we participate in these efforts and developed a curriculum intervention and an assessment instrument consisting of a practical assignment and grading rubrics to assess student’s level of understanding. The rubrics we developed can be used both for formative and summative assessment. In this paper we describe the design of this assessment instrument and indicate further research directions focusing on validation of this instrument.

The introduction of the new Informatics curriculum in the Netherlands in 2019 raises the need for new teaching material that includes practical assignments and guidelines for their assessment. As a part of our research project on teaching Computational Science (modeling and simulation), we participate in these efforts and developed a curriculum intervention and an assessment instrument consisting of a practical assignment and grading rubrics to assess student’s level of understanding. The rubrics we developed can be used both for formative and summative assessment. In this paper we describe the design of this assessment instrument and indicate further research directions focusing on validation of this instrument.