Perspectival Computational Thinking for Learning Physics: A Case Study of Collaborative Agent-based Modeling

Abstract

We examine the process through which computational thinking develops in a perspectival fashion as two middle school students collaborate with each other in order to develop computational models of two graphs of motion. We present an interaction analysis of the students' discourse and computational modeling, and analyze how they came to a joint understanding of the goal of the modeling activity. We show that this process involves bringing about coherence between multiple perspectives: the object in motion, the computational agent, the other student, and graphs of motion.