Designing Digital Affordances Against the Syntax Barrier: A Blended Learning Design Framework for Computational Thinking Development in Secondary ICT Education

This study investigates how a practitioner-led Professional Learning Community (PLC) developed, implemented, and evaluated a pedagogically-driven blended learning design for programming education across Grades 7–12 in a specialised secondary school in Kazakhstan, with the aim of supporting computational thinking development (Wing, 2006). The study identifies the ‘syntax barrier’ — the tendency for students to reproduce code syntax without understanding the computational process it encodes — as a domain-specific manifestation of cognitive overload requiring principled instructional design. Through three Lesson Study cycles and a two-year Action Research programme, four ICT teachers developed and evaluated four digital affordance types — simulation, anonymity, synchronous co-construction, and asynchronous preparation — constituting a Blended Learning Design Framework (BLDF) in which each tool is selected for the specific cognitive or affective function it performs. Findings suggest that this affordance-driven design is associated with improved conceptual understanding: 83–85% of Grade 8 students achieved target outcomes on individual exit tickets for iterative programming constructs, and all Grade 12 student pairs successfully completed and defended case-method mini-projects on logical structures. An emergent design hypothesis — the ‘habituation effect’ — is proposed: students who perform well under scaffolded digital conditions may struggle when those supports are removed, raising important questions for blended learning assessment design. The study also identifies one analytically significant case of tool misfit, constraining any claim that digital affordances are uniformly effective. The study contributes: (1) the syntax barrier as a theorised instructional pattern requiring design response; (2) the BLDF as a four-type affordance taxonomy grounded in classroom evidence; (3) a five-step ladder of autonomy fading protocol; and (4) a practitioner-led inquiry model for developing blended learning design competence.