Computational thinking
[1] In education, CT is a set of problem-solving methods that involve expressing problems and their solutions in ways that a computer could also execute.
[3] For the first ten years computational thinking was a US-centered movement, and still today that early focus is seen in the field's research.
[15][16] By decomposing a problem, identifying the variables involved using data representation, and creating algorithms, a generic solution results.
Other nations like Australia, China, Korea, and New Zealand have embarked on massive efforts to introduce computational thinking in schools.
Similar to Seymour Papert, Alan Perlis, and Marvin Minsky before, Jeannette Wing envisioned computational thinking becoming an essential part of every child's education.
Teachers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) focused classrooms that include computational thinking, allow students to practice problem-solving skills such as trial and error.
[26] There are online institutions that provide a curriculum, and other related resources, to build and strengthen pre-college students with computational thinking, analysis and problem-solving.
In general, a PROBE will seek to find a solution for a broadly applicable problem and avoid narrowly focused issues.
Some examples of PROBE experiments are optimal kidney transplant logistics and how to create drugs that do not breed drug-resistant viruses.
[32] The strategic goal is to have computer science recognized in school as an autonomous scientific subject more than trying to identify "body of knowledge" or "assessment methods" for CT.
Without the "effective agent", who automatically executes the instructions received to solve the problem, there would be no computer science, but just mathematics.
The paper therefore generalizes the original definitions by Cuny, Snyder, and Wing[33] and Aho[1] as follows: "Computational thinking is the thought processes involved in modeling a situation and specifying the ways an information-processing agent can effectively operate within it to reach an externally specified (set of) goal(s)."
And, the latest movement in STEM education is based on suggestions (by learning theories) that we teach students experts' habits of mind.
Only when we link the experts' habits of mind to fundamental cognitive processes can we then narrow their skill-sets down to more basic competencies that can be taught to novices.
