Fostering of computational thinking (CT) skills has become an essential goal for engineering courses. This paper provides and discusses a teaching approach based on model‐eliciting activity (MEA) for enhancing students' CT in existing engineering courses. To verify the proposed approach, experimental studies were performed with students in the practicum unit of a computer‐aided engineering course. First, we investigated the feasibility of integrating CT training into the engineering courses through guiding students to perform a topic‐specific design task. Second, we compared the influences of the MEA‐based approach and conventional lecture‐based approach on students' learning effect with respect to course objectives and CT skills. Results show the CT‐integrated teaching did not at least weaken the teaching effect of the engineering course, and the MEA‐based approach seems to be more conducive to strengthening students' skills of identifying and solving problems, as well as team cooperation. Results also show the learning effect of the MEA group has apparent advantages for enhancing CT skills. These findings suggest that using MEA in engineering courses is beneficial to promote students' CT skills in terms of simplification, embedding, transformation, and simulation.

中文翻译：

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使用模型引发活动增强本科工程课程中的计算思维

培养计算思维（CT）技能已成为工程课程的基本目标。本文提供并讨论了一种基于模型激发活动（MEA）的教学方法，以在现有的工程课程中提高学生的CT。为了验证所提出的方法，在计算机辅助工程课程的实习单元中对学生进行了实验研究。首先，我们通过指导学生执行主题特定的设计任务，研究了将CT培训纳入工程课程的可行性。其次，我们比较了基于MEA的方法和基于常规讲座的方法对学生在课程目标和CT技能方面的学习效果的影响。结果表明，CT集成教学至少没有削弱工程课程的教学效果，基于MEA的方法似乎更有助于增强学生识别和解决问题的技能以及团队合作。结果还表明，MEA组的学习效果对于增强CT技能具有明显的优势。这些发现表明，在工程课程中使用MEA有助于简化，嵌入，转换和仿真方面的学生CT技能。