Abstract

The study first aimed to reveal self-reported computational thinking and new media literacy skill levels of first-year engineering students with various demographics such as gender, departments, and internet use frequency. It was then aimed to test whether there is a significant relation between computational skills and new media literacy skills. The study group consisted of 112 engineering candidates who were enrolled at the engineering faculty of a university in Mugla city in Turkey. The Computational Thinking Scale and the New Media Literacy Scale were used as the data collection instruments. Means and standard deviation were used for descriptive analysis. One-Way Analysis of Variance, two-tailed independent samples t-Test, Tukey HSD test and simple regression were used for statistical analysis. Findings suggest that engineering student participants consider their computational thinking and new media literacy skills to be sufficient. In addition, while the variables such as gender and department were not found to be affecting to the computational thinking and new media literacy levels, internet use frequency was found to be affecting. Furthermore, the study results indicated that the relationship between participant’ computational thinking and new media literacy level is statistically significant and positive. Our study adds to the growing body of literature on new media literacy skills through improving computational thinking skills. Findings are then discussed in lights of the relevant literature.

Citation

Ata, R. & Yıldırım, K. (2020). Analysis of the Relation Between Computational Thinking and New Media Literacy Skills of First-Year Engineering Students. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 29(1), 5-20. Waynesville, NC USA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved March 26, 2023 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/208637/.

© 2020 Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)