  The field of computational thinking education has grown in recent years as
researchers and educators have sought to develop and assess students'
computational thinking abilities. While much of the research in this area has
focused on defining computational thinking, the competencies it involves and
how to assess them in teaching and learning contexts, this work takes a
different approach. We provide a more situated perspective on computational
thinking, focusing on the types of problems that require computational thinking
skills to be solved and the features that support these processes. We develop a
framework for analysing existing computational thinking problems in an
educational context. We conduct a comprehensive literature review to identify
prototypical activities from areas where computational thinking is typically
pursued in education. We identify the main components and characteristics of
these activities, along with their influence on activating computational
thinking competencies. The framework provides a catalogue of computational
thinking skills that can be used to understand the relationship between problem
features and competencies activated. This study contributes to the field of
computational thinking education by offering a tool for evaluating and revising
existing problems to activate specific skills and for assisting in designing
new problems that target the development of particular competencies. The
results of this study may be of interest to researchers and educators working
in computational thinking education.
