TEACHING COMPUTATIONAL THINKING IN LEARNING COMMUNITY: A CASE STUDY OF SOLKAN PRIMARY SCHOOL

Slovene kindergartens and schools have introduced a learning community where teachers learn from and with each other, acquire knowledge, and strengthen students' skills. The success of such connections depends on shared values, attitudes, beliefs, and supportive mutual relationships. Teachers are essential when Slovene school participates in development projects B-RIN, aimed at introducing fundamental computer science and informatics content and computational thinking into kindergarten groups and school classes. When selecting members of the development team, the participants were guided by the criterion that the selected educators and teachers are open to exploring their teaching practices, capable of continuously upgrading and evaluating their pedagogical work, and developing and improving their teaching approaches based on the study of their practice, emphasizing student-centred approaches. The purpose of this contribution is to highlight the implicit theories and attitudes of the development team and school staff regarding the understanding and importance of introducing fundamental B-RIN content and computational thinking into teaching, not only in the STEM field but also in other subject areas, and to present the approaches with which participants have influenced the implicit theories and attitudes of teachers and educators within our VI organization. This is also because training students in computational thinking and fundamental computer science and informatics content significantly impacts the development of metacognitive strategies, such as problem-solving skills, especially for open-ended problems, self-regulation learning skills, perseverance in facing failure, consequently greater resilience, and encouraging creativity. Therefore, it also broadly impacts the mental health of students.