Doherty

In defining computational thinking it seems that the crux of the problem is whether or not the thinking must exist in context. Educators are grappling with this across disciplines especially because research shows that students have difficulty translating knowledge into new contexts. For instance, children who use math in their daily lives may not perform well on math assessments in school. This begs the question—will students who use computational elements such as loops, iteration and debugging in contexts other than programming be able to use them in a programing context?

Personally, I think this is the goal, but I’m not sure it helps elucidate the elements of teaching computational thinking. We keep skipping around computers in our class discussions, almost as if trying to define computational thinking without computers (used broadly to mean any computational machine). Thus children would learn computational thinking in their other classes, as suggested by Grover and Pea. Yet, I am very skeptical. I don’t think all students would then translate the knowledge into a computer context. Certainly some would transfer the knowledge, but the access seems limited.

Additionally, as DiSessa discusses, computational literacy appears when computers and the like integrate so well into our lives that we use them unconsciously. Therefore we cannot leave out the computer in discussing computational thinking if we want to gain computational literacy. Computers are unique in that at the base level they can take yes or no questions only. Thinking within that context varies greatly from thinking within a human brain. Or so it seems to us as we think.

So while the modes of thinking existed before computers and exist in other contexts I’m coming down on the side of needing computers to teaching computational thinking. Without integrating them into our thinking, we’ll never achieve the literacy put forth by DiSessa.