Multiple Solution Pathways of Learners’ Embodied Problem-solving Processes in Designing Authentic Computational Tasks

Abstract

When undergraduate students engage with computational thinking (CT) activities that are authentic to them, it adds not only meaning to their problem-solving actions but also a variation to their strategies and mechanisms applied during problem-solving, termed here as learners’ embodied processes. Through the perspective of designing for embodied cognition, maintaining such possibilities for variation in solution pathways could be the key to making problem-solving authentic to the learners. Using the 4E cognition narratives of two undergraduate Arts learner’s pathways in solving computational tasks in an authentic setting, we speculate that such multiple solution pathways need to be evaluated in pilot studies for density of significant actions during problemsolving to prioritize the actions that show spaces which require the design of embodied scaffolds.