Hasan, Computation thinking on STEM: Electric Circuits

The paper of Weintrop (and colleagues) was a real prize for me to go through to get an exact definition for what does it mean to teach CT. For a class project I am developing a visual environment for the teachers to design course modules. With help of the provided taxonomy I might be able to give insights to a teacher what CT concepts a course module may be able to cover.

One of the domains I would need to provide support to the teachers for is the Electric Circuits. Being at very early stage I am having hard time to find out how a student should learn about electric circuits using programming. Traditionally questions on introductory electric circuits are given similar to this: Provided with a circuit diagram students are asked to find out an electrical parameter on a particular point in the diagram. The students could write a general program to solve for the unknown variables using a suitable algorithm when given any circuit. They could devise the algorithm based on what they know of electric circuits. Now, normally in our traditional courses in school a students need to solve similar problems using same algorithm again and again whereas in programming environment once they write a program they would not need to write that again. They could express a new problem to the program and the program would do the rest for them. But would that make the student learn to solve circuit problems better than the traditional curriculum where they are trained to solve the same problem again and again to become skillful in that?

Is not it more important and useful to learn when to use addition and subtraction than learning how they work? Reusing is a part of computational thinking. Imagine on the context of learning about circuits on what shall students invest more time-in learning to solve diverse circuits by expressing the circuits into algebraic system of equation or in learning to design circuits for diverse scenarios? A high school student would know how the underlying falsified system of electricity works but cannot design electricity distribution network inside a house. CT teaches one to reuse and to not reinvent the wheel again. Why should student have to do the opposites? Why they are not allowed to accelerate? Is CT the way to break the shackle of linear growth and could it lead to the possible fruits of the exponentials?