Reflective abstraction in computational thinking

Computational thinking has become an increasingly popular notion in K-12 and college level education. Although researchers have accepted that abstraction is a central concept in computational thinking, they are quick to disagree on the meaning of it. A focus on reflective abstraction has led to the development of APOS Theory in Mathematics education. This has resulted in many cases of improved student learning in Mathematics (Arnon et al., 2013). Our main aim in this paper is to construct a theoretical bridge between computational thinking and APOS Theory and show that reflective abstraction can be used in the context of computational thinking.