Fai—Computational thinking in different disciplines

What does computational thinking mean?

From Wing (2006), it seems that the following are important.

• Computational thinking involves problem solving. 
• Computational thinking uses abstraction and decomposition to attack large complex systems. 
• Computational thinking is about conceptualizing, not only about programming; it’s about the ideas, not just rote skills.

What are the different characterizations of relationships between disciplinary content/practices and computational thinking?

I have been trying to work this out in the past couple of weeks, and this week’s readings helped with this question, so I’m going to try to summarize my current understanding here. I also think whether particular disciplinary content supports or does not support computational thinking depends how one conceptualizes the relationship between the two.

Here’s what I’ve catalogued so far.

• Computational thinking facilitates content learning. For example, students writing out codes for different theories of how an object fall helps them better visualize differences between theories. 
• Content facilitates learning to program. For example, students who know something about a complex system can investigate a model in NetLogo, and leverage their understanding about the system to understand the programming.
• Computational thinking becomes an integral part of learning in that discipline. This means that it’s not just a tool to help students better understand the content, but computational thinking has a role in doing that discipline.

I’m still trying to be more clear about this, so that when I read other people’s work, I can quickly grasp what they are doing, and also so that when I design for learning, I can be clear about what I’m doing, while keeping other goals in mind.

Literacy

Burke (2012) pointed out that in the storytelling format, students engaged with only a subset of programming concepts coordination and synchronization, parallel execution, loops and event handling, and rarely engaged with Boolean logic, conditional statements and variables.

A few months ago, I did a small investigation for another class. (Doing an investigation is a little bit an overstatement; I just took a glance.) I was wondering whether different kinds of project Scratch users chose to do afford different kinds of opportunities to engage with programming. I went to the “Explore” page on Scratch. I looked at projects under the Stories and Games categories. I sorted projects by “Most Loved” in the past 30 days. Below is the numbers of scripts / spites used in the top ten projects listed under each category.

Here is what I found.

What I found agrees with what Burke found. I took a look at that because oftentimes the rationale to use storytelling to motivate programming is often gendered, e.g. in Erete et al. (2015) or Storytelling Alice (a Logo-based platform developed specifically to motivate girls to do programming).

There appears to be a distinct difference in the numbers of scripts and sprites used in Stories projects and those used in Games projects. This difference does not suggest that Stories projects are more simplistic and Games projects are more complex. However, the difference does suggest that people who tend to create stories with Scratch and people who tend to create games with Scratch may have different opportunities to learn to program. I don’t mean to suggest that it is simply a matter of more opportunities and fewer opportunities to learn (which in turns leads to more skills and fewer skills), although that may also be the case. More importantly, this difference suggests that people may come to know programming very differently, because they have differential access to different programming practices depending on what kinds of project they choose to engage in, and this difference is typically found to be gendered.

I want to acknowledge other kinds of work that this approach is doing, namely it has a lot of potential to give girls another space for identity work, as Erete et al. (2015) pointed out.  However, while the storytelling approach may be useful in initiating interest in programming for girls, I still wonder what is the rest of the trajectory may look like so that girls really do have access to all the facets of programming practices.

If our goal is to introduce students to programming, so that they can use it to whatever they want to do with it, then storytelling seems to be a productive format; students who are interested in that format can see the point of programming, and use programming to support what they are doing with storytelling. If our goal is to make sure that students have opportunities to engage fully with computational practices, one format might be too limited.

Science

I only have a short question in terms of computational thinking + science. I rarely see works (possibly because I haven’t read that much) that discuss what designers/educators can do to support student thinking about the connection between the models and the physical world. In other words, how do I trust that the swarm of little turtles on the screen has anything to do with anything?