Eid Carol- Computational Thinking

 Wing defines computational thinking as “an approach to solving problems, designing systems and understanding human behavior that that draws on concepts fundamental to computing.”

               My takeaway from the readings is that computational thinking is a way of thinking about and solving problems that stems from an understanding of what computers are able to do. Real life problems are abstracted then transformed into code so that computers could generate, or assist us in generating, solutions that we are unable to resolve on our own. It also seems that “computational thinking” has been later dissociated from the presence of a computer and has become an approach for thinking about matters in order to come up with solutions and understandings that are hard to reach otherwise.

This week’s papers:

In Erete et al.’s paper, “Employing narratives to trigger interest in computational activity with inner-city girls,” it is not clear how the participants approached computational thinking. Narratives were not part of the code; they were utilized as a way to trigger situational interest in coding. Burke’s paper, “The Markings of a New Pencil,” on the other hand, describes more details about the programming process. Due to the nature of the task, which was storytelling, some concepts related to computational thinking were attended to more than others (for instance, 90% of the projects utilized loops whereas only 20% utilized Boolean logic).

Last week’s papers:

It appeared to me that Simpson et al.’s paper was more concerned about developing  students' intuitive understanding on the law of conservation of energy than about developing their computational skills. The interface that the students utilized was highly abstracted and did not require advanced computational concepts to be able to model collisions. Moreover, and as mentioned by the authors, the program was not flexible or transparent enough so that students could “interrogate [its] inner workings” (p. 157).

Starlogo, on the other hand, requires abstracting agent behavior and translating it into code, which highly matched Wing's description of computational thinking. Nevertheless, since Starlogo (or at least how much the readings revealed about it) allows the user to program the turtle and the patch only, it is very limiting. Some real life problems will be abstracted in ways that will require a much more flexible platform to resolve them, but this should be an obvious point.