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The concept, development and assessment of computational thinking have increasingly become the focus of research in recent years. Most of this type of research focuses on older children or adults. Preschool age is a sensitive period when many skills develop intensively, so the development of computational thinking skills can already begin at this age. The increased interest in this field requires the development of appropriate assessments. Currently, there are only a limited number of computational thinking assessments for preschool children. Based on this shortcoming, an assessment tool, named AlgoPaint Unplugged Computational Thinking Assessment for Preschool, was created addressed for 4-7 years old children. It is a paper-pencil-based test, which examines the following computational thinking domains: algorithms and debugging. Regarding computational concepts, simple instructions, simple and nested loops, and conditionals are included in the test. For the preliminary testing, AlgoPaint test was applied by 11 preschool teachers with 56 preschool age children. The test was also evaluated by 6 experts in algorithmic thinking working at universities. Based on the feedback given by the teachers and the experts, and the results of the children, AlgoPaint Computational Thinking Test was revised and completed. The revised version of the test is included in the appendix of the paper.

Gamification is a rather new method in education and unfortunately is not a widely known method among Hungarian primary school teachers in Romania. This paper presents the knowledge and opinion of pre-service preschool and primary school teachers about gamification and its use in education. In this study 81 Primary and Preschool Pedagogy students from Babe?-Bolyai University were participated, 80 of them were female and 1 male. 40 students are in first year and 41 in second year of their studies. The research was carried out during February-March 2020 at Babe?-Bolyai University, Romania. To get to know their point of view and knowledge about gamification, an online questionnaire was developed by the authors. The obtained data was quantitatively (closed questions) and qualitatively (open questions) analyzed. According to the results, half of the students think that there is no difference between gamification and game-based learning and for three quarter it is difficult to see the differences. This is surprising as students were taught about gamification before filling in the questionnaire. Students perceive a high level of utility of gamification in education. The most frequently mentioned benefits by the participants are that gamification motivates and actively involves students. Even if participants gave many advantages of integrating gamification in education, the biggest disadvantage is related with the time necessary for preparation of a gamified lesson and for the time-allocation during the lesson. As obstacles of using gamification, they mentioned the negative attitude or/and lack of methodological knowledge of some teachers and the constrains of the curriculum. Most of the preservice teachers prefer both paper-pencil based and technology-aid gamification. They consider solving exercises the most suitable for gamification.

One of the most difficult types of arithmetic word problems in primary school is compare problems. Among these problems, the most problematic are those in which the relational term is not consistent with the arithmetic operation required for the solution. This study investigates how 10-11-year-old primary school pupils' read and interpret compare word problems. The consistency effect and the differences between successful and unsuccessful problem solvers are mainly studied using eye-tracking technology. The results show that students are more successful in solving consistent language (CL) problems than inconsistent language (IL) problems. Regarding eye movements during reading and solving the problems, fixation duration on the relational sentence and numbers is longer in the case of IL problems than in the case of CL problems. Compared to successful problem solvers, unsuccessful solvers fixate longer on the relational term, the pronominal reference word, and the statement and relational sentence of IL problems, but not on numbers.