Let me have a take on to elaborate a bit on the term Computing. Compute means to calculate. Its dictionary meaning is “to determine especially by mathematical means”, “calculate or reckon”. How the use of calculation shaped the current world and the history of evolution up to this point? I do not wish to comment on such a point while it is a known factor. One way to be misguided about Computational Thinking or Computational Literacy is thinking of them as to think like programmers or learning to do programming. Inspired from the readings I would like to stress in telling that it is not so. It is the way the human thinks. There are patterns in everything. And patterns are rules and rules rule.
I was really impressed by the trials of Quinn Burke with the students to introduce Programming-as-Writing. I was never really exposed to creative writing in a way where I would have gained any knowledge on its underlying conceptual constructs and strategies. Reading this paper opened my eyes up to a certain amazing vision about writing and a very little part of its science. I got the feeling that writing could actually be approached in computational way which means strategically and could be measured for its quality in terms of its effectiveness on a certain type of readers. In another way to express it: machines could in fact write great stories or even poems since writing is also a computational process. I felt really lucky when I got to know about the different abstractions which are used when writing such as mentioned in that paper as “Essential story elements e.g. denouncement, rising action, conflict, resolution and characterization”. I found that using scratch as Quinn’s students did for writing could really help one to practice writing concepts and slowly one could improve upon the writing skills.
Last thing I want to refer is about the programming language. From the last weeks reading I noticed how state of a programming language could bind a student in learning about a scientific concept more deeply for the lack of its support to express higher level concepts easily. Still that may prove to be even better for someone when one still fights to model the concept anyway, but generally it may be disengaging for the most especially to be embedded into the standard school curriculum. Notice how the students who tried modeling laws of conservation faced difficulty and how they were needed to be supported with better modules by the platform developers. Thing is, lacking in a certain programming language or environment does not entail lacking in the idea of the use of modeling with computational language in general to learn concepts. The science concepts that students learn are deeply computational. Certainly using programming powers up students to explore the concepts in-depth and students gets powered up to use the concepts more fluently than they would be by learning symbolic representation on paper and trying to simulate those in mind. But I would argue about the need for higher level programming constructs with more powerful simulation features for the students. And of course it is not as easy as to just say to use programming to learn concepts especially when asked to bring up ideas to teach students for next week. That is when we need visionary teachers and researchers to bring up ideas and developers to bring up powerful programming environments and a merger of the two. I am here to help with our leaders with their ideas for the USN in the upcoming weeks. Eid Mubarak!
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