Algorithmic thinking observation: How students of applied informatics break the mystery of black box applications

The Black Box is a system with the internal organization and behavior about which the observer has no information. However, it is possible to impact the whole system via its inputs and observe its reactions via its outputs. The paper is concerned with the implementation of “black box” type of activities to teach computational thinking. The main idea is to give the students the puzzles and ask them to “play” with the inputs and observe the outputs enough to determine the internal mechanisms or principles that produce particular outputs from given inputs. First year students were asked to define a formula or describe a principle, based on which the input transforms itself into the output. There were four different types of answers: the student could be able (1) to state a formal proof, (2) to state a verbal proof, (3) to state a basic concept of algorithms, or (4) not to state any type of correct solution. We found out that a lot of the students were not able to think about the concept of the application functioning and were not able to create any formal description of algorithms.