Marcia Linn and the ICER Keynote
Earlier this morning Marcia Linn gave the Keynote at ICER entitled “Learning to Teach Computer Programming”. The work that she talked about, while containing some historical perspective about teaching computer science, was mostly about a new report “Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge” and two initiatives: Computational Thinking and 21st Century Skills Movement.
I have not read the Cyberlearning report, so I do not have a lot to comment about it.
As far as the Computational Thinking and 21st Century Skills movement - first I was very happy to hear the “21st Century Skills” agenda introduced at a computer science. She even gave a link to the 21stcenturyskills.org website and showed their “rainbow” curriculum model.
Marcia showed us a simulation from the WISE collection of Science simulations and tried to model how this was a computational thinking/21st Century Skill activity. (It was about global temperature and you could control the amount of C02 that was added to the environment) I was not convinced that it was truly a computational thinking activity. One of the features of computational thinking that I was struck by the first time I heard Jeanette Wing speak about it was the idea that Automation was one of the three key aspects of computational thinking. Its not just about looking a representation of information, but it is about somehow automating some process. The WISE collection of activities is great, but I’m not sure its really computational thinking.
Marcia also talked about a cycle of knowledge building that can be used through a tutor or electronic environment where students go through a 4 stage process of generating ideas, adding ideas, evaluating those ideas and finally sorting the ideas based on the evaluation. This reminded me a little of the misconception research that says you need to expose student’s misconceptions in order to move past them, however it was unclear how incorrect ideas in this process would be “weeded out”.
Still processing what my take away from that talk will be.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
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August 12th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
I’ve also been wondering about this trend of equating simulation use with computational thinking and am glad to read that someone else is a little uncomfortable with the idea! Learning to create simulations has a lot of great intellectual content and applications to many fields, especially in science and engineering, but I don’t think that using them does all that much for students beyond helping them understand complex, invisible or hard-to-replicate phenomena.
September 8th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
I am also uncomfortable with the term “computational thinking.” One concern is that I do not have a handle on what the set of interesting problems is that demands computational thinking instead of whatever people already use. Another is that despite reading and re-reading Wing’s work, I remain unclear on what exactly it is.
Here’s an example of what I think it is. A couple of years ago, I went to a high school math contest at which a door prize would be drawn for students who completed the following problem: http://charlotte.pausd.org/~jpaley/AP_CS/TFTN.html. Now, this is clearly (to me, anyway) a computational thinking problem. Either you have awareness of how a computer can solve problems (in this case, loops) or you don’t. (Good luck to the high school math student with no programming background.) Unfortunately, this may also be an uninteresting problem in that it is questionable as to whether it has any practical value.
The argument for computational thinking is that it ought to have practical value beyond what people can currently do and therefore should be taught. Until someone can explain to me in easy, plain English what a canonical set of meaningful problems looks like such that without computational thinking, they would be either problematic, painfully difficult, or horribly slow to solve, then I guess I remain a skeptic as well. (I grant that my skepticism may be due to personal limitations, although I hope not!)
September 10th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I agree Computational Thinking is very important and can be a very important tool no mater what area you are in. i am wondering why there are no tools to support computational thinking. if we relay want to push this idea i think its more then teaching a powerful way to think but also giving them the power to do something with this thinking method. its like standards committees, whats better defining a standard if how to do something or just providing a tool to do it by the standard very easily. as a programmer i don’t want to implement long standards but i don’t care about taking a ready module with a simple interface that will implement the standard. should we be educating or creating tool for computational thinking ?