CoolThink@JC Implementation Study

SRI Education is conducting a comprehensive implementation study of the CoolThink@JC computational thinking curriculum in Hong Kong primary schools. The project will evaluate and advise on the initiative’s goals of supporting high-quality adoption in over 200 primary schools and laying a foundation throughout the system for more widespread adoption.

CoolThink@JC is an ambitious initiative that seeks to inspire digital creativity and problem-solving skills in Hong Kong students from a young age. Created and funded by The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust and co-created by leading innovators at The Education University of Hong Kong, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and City University of Hong Kong, CoolThink@JC offers teaching materials, professional development, co-teaching support and a learning platform to support the mainstreaming of computational thinking education within Hong Kong’s formal primary school curriculum. After a successful 32-school pilot, the multi-stakeholder initiative is now seeking to broaden its reach, forming partnerships throughout the education system and supporting a critical mass of schools to promote computational thinking education for primary-age students throughout Hong Kong.

The CoolThink@JC team also recognizes that sustained success at scale is often an elusive target. For this reason, SRI International is conducting a rigorous implementation study to investigate CoolThink@JC activities and outcomes at the classroom, school, and system levels. The implementation study will employ a variety of methods, including surveys both within and beyond the CoolThink@JC network, school site visits, classroom logs, professional development observations, and a correlation of implementation factors with student learning outcomes. Through these varied lenses the study seeks to illuminate progress and lessons learned on the path to successful implementation at scale.

Over the 3.5 years of this study, the SRI team will produce baseline, midline, and endline reports of implementation progress and outcomes, as well as two topical reports that will describe in more detail specific aspects of implementation at scale that can inform computational thinking educational initiatives beyond Hong Kong. The baseline report below describes the context of education in Hong Kong through the lens of the schools and teachers that will be adopting the initiative in the coming years.