Computational Thinking
Computational thinking has a rich history spanning over 4,000 years!
However, it has become popular in primary schools in recent decades due to increased use of technology in our lives and the creation of student-friendly tools like LEGO robotics and the Scratch coding language.
Defining Computational Thinking
For the project, computational thinking was defined through a constructionist lens as the “making and understanding of computational objects” (Papert, 2006, p. 8).
Teaching Computational Thinking
This involves helping students to see these connections in the real world, to help them to think like an artist, a scientist, a geographer and so on and to understand how to use computation to solve their problems, to create, to critique and to discover new questions that can be explored through many avenues (Hemmendinger, 2010).
To help learners with making and understanding computational objects, we can draw upon specific computational thinking concepts.
An exact list of computational concepts doesn’t exist and a recent European report listed over 32 different concepts!!!
These Computational Thinking concepts are fundamental ideas and approaches used to solve problems and understand systems in a way that’s aligned with how computers work.
These concepts provide a framework for thinking logically and systematically in various contexts.
The key computational thinking concepts focused on during the SFI Discover WEAVE Project included;
– decomposition
– pattern recognition
– abstraction
– debugging
– algorithmic thinking
