Abstrakt
In the Czech Republic, from 2021/22, instead of the subject "ICT", the compulsory subject "Informatics" is gradually being introduced into the education of primary and secondary schools. Kindergartens will also focus on developing pre-school children computational thinking (CT).
The main aim of these curricular changes is to develop students' CT and support their digital competence across all educational areas.In-service teachers and student teachers should be ready for such radical changes in education.
The paper summarises the perceptions of primary education student teachers at the Faculty of Education, Charles University (PedF UK) about CT. These student teachers completed the subject "ICT" aimed on skills how to use computers and the internet and on to be digitally literate at secondary school education, they have no idea what informatics/ computer science deals with. The authors demonstrate how these student teachers, introduced in two semester course of digital technology in primary education, begin to understand the concept of CT. Qualitative data were gathered in 2020-22 from student teachers' essays in which the students analysed informatics tasks (from Beabras contest and books introduced children to computing written by Linda Liukas) and designed teaching approaches how to support pupils to be able to solve these tasks. The student teachers found out that there are some differences between mathematical and computational thinking and that CT development in primary education requires logical thinking, reading literacy and counting abilities.