Students who participated in the co-design process gained 21st-century skills such as creative thinking, problem solving, and collaboration to design mini-games.

The study results delineated that co-designing smart learningĮnvironments to facilitate students’ understanding of computational thinking is a pragmatic pedagogical approach in the Nigerian context.

This research produced three main outputs: (i) an online co-design process as a pedagogical approach for conducting a user-centered study (ii) an artefact called iThinkSmart, developed to immerse learners in a virtual world while learning computational thinking concepts by playing mini-games and (iii) proposed guiding principles for mainstreaming computational thinking education in Nigerian higher education institutions. The online co-design process was formulated to accommodate the prevalent situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, where a face-to-face co-design meeting with stakeholders was infeasible for creating interventions. This study employed a pragmatic design science research methodology and strengthened the rigor of the framework by infusing an online co-design process. In particular, for computer science novices in Nigerian universities who have not been previously exposed to programming, computational thinking knowledge such as problem decomposition, abstraction, algorithmic thinking, recursive thinking, and pattern recognition could help them to gain programming knowledge. Computational thinking is a requisite for students in the digital age, not only because it provides the necessary skills for solving many contextual problems daily but also because it is crucial for preparing young learners for future career challenges. Smart learning is a new learning approach where learner-centered pedagogy and advanced technology play major roles in education. This study examined how to co-design a student-centered smart learning environment to facilitate computational thinking education in the context of a Nigerian higher education institution.

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