In Asia, the availability of school counselors is significantly lower than global standards recommend, particularly in elementary education settings. This shortage is exacerbated by rising mental health concerns among young students, particularly those with emotional disorders. Considering the critical gap in the provision of mental health services in Asia, this paper studies a digital intervention approach with an AI-driven supportive system developed by adopting OpenAI to enhance the effectiveness of counseling in elementary education. Twenty-two students with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and emotional disorders undergoing counseling at a primary school in Taiwan were recruited as participants for a three-month experiment, with the five Social-Emotional competencies as dependent variables. The treatment group utilized the proposed system with a digital journaling platform to help students reflect on their emotions, thoughts, and actions after counseling sessions, fostering an ongoing dialogue with their counselors through the system. Conversely, the control group received standard counseling without integrating the use of the proposed platform. The results of a two-factor mixed design ANOVA revealed that students who did not use the supportive system showed significant improvement in self-awareness. In contrast, students who went through the new model demonstrated significant changes in all competencies. These findings highlight the value of the proposed intervention approach for students with emotional disorders and suggest broader applications for AI technologies in school counseling, offering valuable insights for educators and policymakers.

The transformative wave of generative AI is reshaping the creative thinking processes of learners, posing a significant challenge to education and industry in cultivating technological literacy and creativity. This study delves into the exploration of how learners can effectively tackle new challenges by deconstructing fragments from a macro perspective and generating innovative methods or concepts. In the Scratch visual programming environment, learners in the self-regulated learning mode observed entire functioning projects, facilitating easy disassembly and learning, namely by using Code Decomposed by Learner (CDBL). A total of 104 fifth-grade students were divided into two learning scaffoldings: (1) domain-general, learning from the top down (CDBL-TD), and (2) domain-specific, learning from the bottom up (CDBL-BU). Students in the CDBL-TD group exhibited a high degree of completion, strong exploration abilities, and the willingness to experiment with unlearned functions. Although there was no significant difference in originality between the two groups, students in the CDBL-TD group showcased greater uniqueness in designing characters or items within the game. This study introduces a novel programming learning scaffolding, offering instructors a tool to guide students’ creativity and enhance their programming capabilities.

Computational thinking (CT) has become one of the critical goals of teaching CS programming courses. Computational skills consist of skills taken in a computational form in learning programming and dealing with daily life. More research adopted games to teach CT skills. This paper investigated two games, Little Alchemy 2 and Dr. Sudoku, to promote CS students’ CT skills and applied international Bebras tests to measure their CT skills. The results showed that CT skills in problem decomposition and pattern recognition could be improved via digital games. Thus, this study contributes to computing education using available digital games to promote CS college students’ CT abilities.

The development of creativity plays a decisive role in the future development of human life as it stimulates divergent thinking and grants the critical ability to innovate and solve problems. Therefore, the question of how to encourage students’ creativity has also attracted the attention of related research in various fields. Our study used the Scratch visual programming tool to allow students to create their own digital games. We used different technological devices as external stimuli during the research process to stimulate students’ creative ideas. We provided four control devices: a keyboard and mouse, PicoBoard, a 65-inch touch screen, and a Wii remote control for 92 fifth-grade students in four S-shaped classes. After a 12-week experimental process, students designed their original Scratch game. The results of the study found that differences in device properties correspond to different items of creativity: devices highly relevant to students’ life experiences improve the flexibility and elaboration of creativity. Innovative controls promote creative originality. The freedom of device control can increase the fluency of creativity. Therefore, providing control devices with different properties will allow teachers to establish learning environments that foster creativity. Finally, we speculate on the impact of other control devices on creativity based on the research results for future reference.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, courses for all ages in many countries moved online. The ability to use information technology fluently for learning has become a vital issue. Whether students can develop computational thinking (CT) literacy in online or offline learning environments is investigated. Two web games, Rummikub and Robozzle, are applied to teach computational thinking through Google Meet, Google Classroom, and offline live teaching. The results indicate that offline training activities are more appropriate for middle school students.