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i. developing CT skills in children and young people to enable them to think in a
different way, express themselves through a variety of media, solve real-world
problems, and analyse everyday issues from a different perspective;
ii. fostering CT to boost economic growth, fill job vacancies in ICT, and prepare
for future employment.

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21 century skills have also been emphasized in Malaysia curriculum through
the Malaysia Education Blueprint (2013- 2025). Teachers are being trained to integrate
high order thinking skills (HOTs) through the curriculum in school. CT has been
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identified as a new literacy for the 21 century (Grover & Pea, 2017). Both HOTs and
21 century skills are needed to prepare students to be technology creators, problem
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solvers and innovators. They need these skills to survive the challenges of work, life
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and citizenship in the 21 century and beyond (Gorver & Pea, 2017).

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Based on the statistic obtained from MOE website, there are 7772 primary schools all
over Malaysia. This will mean at least a total of 7772 primary school RBT teachers
need to be trained on CT if each school has only one RBT teacher. Teachers teaching
the RBT year 5 and 6 pupils will need training most since CT topics will be covered in
these two years syllabus. Large-scale in-service continuous professional development
course has to be provided for them since these teachers do no learn about CT in their
initial training. RBT teachers need hands-on training especially the practical
application of CT through visual programming tools such as Scratch and Microsoft
Makecode for Microbit:bit controller. Many RBT teachers in Malaysia are still waiting
to be trained on how to integrate CT in teaching. It is very important to evaluate the
effectiveness of training program since it will involve training a large number of in-
service RBT teachers. Training also involves the investiment of time, energy and
money from the organizers. According to Topno (2012), evaluation of training and
development is the most essential aspect of training programme. Thus, one of the
purposes of this research is to find out the effectiveness of CT training conducted for
RBT teachers at a teacher education institute (IPG) in Sarawak based on the training
module provided by MDEC. Another purpose is to map CT RBT training to a formal
CT development framework as a guide.

OBJECTIVES

The main objectives of this research are:
1. to find out the effectiveness of computational thinking professional development
through CT RBT training for teachers at a teacher education institute in Sarawak;
and
2. to map CT RBT training course to a CT professional development framework.