COMPUTING WORKSHOPS FOR STUDENTS WITH HIGH ABILITIES/GIFTEDNESS: CHALLENGE, CREATIVITY AND SELF-PERCEPTION OF COMPUTATIONAL THINKING

Abstract

Students with Giftedness/High Abilities (AH/SD, in Portuguese) often experience, in regular school settings, a mismatch between their learning pace and the challenge level of proposed activities, which may lead to boredom, disengagement, and underuse of creative potential. This article analyzes the perceptions of students with AH/SD regarding a sequence of computing workshops (Scratch, Python, micro:bit, Arduino, and unplugged Artificial Intelligence) offered to a group of elementary school students at the Giftedness/High Abilities support center of the Escola de Educação Básica (EEB) João Colodel, in the municipality of Turvo, Santa Catarina, Brazil, as one of the actions of the Meninas Digitais extension project at Instituto Federal de Santa Catarina (IFSC), Araranguá Campus. The study follows a qualitative-quantitative approach with qualitative predominance and an exploratory character, given the small number of participants, drawing on Renzulli's Three-Ring Conception of Giftedness (1986) and Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory (1990). Three Google Forms instruments were applied: a retrospective questionnaire (before the workshops), an evaluation questionnaire answered after each individual workshop, and a final evaluation questionnaire, allowing individual pre/post comparison for six participants and an aggregate reading of the remaining responses. Results indicate favorable changes in the self-perception of skills related to computational thinking, particularly the perceived ability to create original technological solutions, along with high overall satisfaction and strong interest in continuing to learn. At the same time, 79.3% of the records strongly disagreed that the activities were difficult: an indication, in light of Flow Theory, that the challenge level perceived by the group may have fallen short of its capacity, reinforcing the need to calibrate more compatible challenges for gifted students in future editions of the action.