ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an approach to teaching programming – as an essential part of Computational Literacy – to students not necessarily intrinsically motivated for learning to program. M. Resnick states that creative learning involves tinkerability and is meaningful and social. It is facilitated by letting learners iteratively and incrementally designs projects that are personally meaningful within the settings of a community, collaborating and sharing with others. Meaningfulness can be supported by relating the content to contexts which are significant for the students, including contexts in their daily lives outside school. Adequate complexity principle follows from self-determination theory, more specifically from the need for students to experience self-efficacy: The project should aim at a level of complexity that the students can actually embrace, so that they can succeed in solving the project. Guided tinkerability directly combines Resnick's original principle of tinkerability and self-determination theory's principles of self-efficacy and autonomy with the empirically documented need for structured guidance.
