Educational games have been increasingly used to improve students’ computational thinking. However, most existing games have focused on the theoretical knowledge of computational thinking, ignoring the development of computational thinking skills. Moreover, there is a lack of integration of adaptivity into educational computer games for computational thinking, which is crucial to addressing individual needs in developing computational thinking skills. In this study, we present an adaptive educational computer game, called AutoThinking, for developing students’ computational thinking skills in addition to their conceptual knowledge. To evaluate the effects of the game, we conducted an experimental study with 79 elementary school students in Estonia, where the experimental group learned with AutoThinking, while the control group used a traditional technology-enhanced learning approach. Our findings show that learning with the adaptive educational computer game significantly improved students’ computational thinking related to both conceptual knowledge and skills. Moreover, students using the adaptive educational computer game showed a significantly higher level of interest, satisfaction, flow state, and technology acceptance in learning computational thinking. Implications of the findings are also discussed.

教育游戏已越来越多地用于改善学生的计算思维。但是，大多数现有游戏都专注于计算思维的理论知识，而忽略了计算思维技能的发展。此外，缺乏将适应性集成到用于计算思维的教育计算机游戏中的能力，这对于解决发展计算思维技能的个人需求至关重要。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种自适应教育计算机游戏，称为AutoThinking，用于开发学生的概念知识以外的计算思维能力。为了评估游戏的效果，我们在爱沙尼亚对79名小学生进行了一项实验研究，实验小组在其中学习了自动思考，对照组则使用传统的技术增强学习方法。我们的发现表明，使用自适应教育计算机游戏进行学习可以显着提高学生的与概念知识和技能相关的计算思维。此外，使用自适应教育计算机游戏的学生在学习计算思维时表现出更高的兴趣，满意度，流动状态和技术接受度。结果的含义也进行了讨论。流动状态和学习计算思维的技术接受度。结果的含义也进行了讨论。流动状态和学习计算思维的技术接受度。结果的含义也进行了讨论。