Work in Progress: A Web-Based Tool to Assess Computational Thinking.

When President Obama unveiled his plan to give all students in America the opportunity to learn computer science [1], discussions about Computational Thinking (CT) began in earnest in many organizations across a wide range of disciplines. However, Jeannette Wing stated the importance of CT for everyone a decade earlier in her landmark essay [2]. Since then, several people and organizations have posted their own definition of CT, which presents a challenge in being able to assess CT understanding and awareness in people. In an effort to build consensus on how to best assess CT, the authors have developed a web-based tool that will enable CT experts globally to populate, review and rate questions that address various attributes of CT. TECHFIT (Teaching Engineering Concepts to Harness Future Innovators and Technologists) is an NSF-funded project that is examining the impact of their program's educational intervention based on the participants' delivery context. The CT tool was designed and developed as a functional, web-based tool that supports management of the CT questions database and gives different levels of access to various stakeholders, including the TECHFIT project team and academicians all over the world. The CT tool includes features to enable authorized users to review, insert, and update a variety of questions in different formats. The level of access to this system is determined by the roles/ permissions granted by the administrator. It also enables users to have the ability to rate the questions. The ratings are then aggregated to yield an overall rating value. Attendees of the paper presentation will be invited to sign up and explore this tool to provide feedback for improvement of the tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]