[Yr7-10it] CT and HCI

[Roland Gesthuizen]

This is a bit deep but I thought to share it here. A preservice teacher with a solid CS background remarked a couple of weeks ago about the maturity of junior secondary students to think about coding and computational thinking (CT), remarking that there are many pedagogical and maturity challenges. I have been reading up about CT and the benefits to students, even if they don't go on to study CS.

Lu, J. J., & Fletcher, G. H. L. (2009). Thinking About Computational Thinking. Proceedings of the 40th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 260–264. https://doi.org/10.1145/1508865.1508959 <https://doi.org/10.1145/1508865.1508959>
Much of the recent thinking comes from this discussion paper by Wing that points out the unplugged nature of CT, that it goes beyond just the hardware and software (and perhaps even the programming). This is quite readable at 2 pages and well worth a glance.

Wing, J. (2006). Computational thinking. Communications of the ACM, 49(3), 33–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/1118178.1118215 <https://doi.org/10.1145/1118178.1118215>
"Computational thinking is reformulating a seemingly difficult problem into one we know how to solve, perhaps by reduction, embedding, transformation, or simulation ... Computational thinking is thinking recursively. It is parallel processing. It is interpreting code as data and data as code... Computational thinking is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task or designing a large complex system. It is separation of concerns. (Wing 2006:33 <>)

The debate is still going on with this recent post that is even challenges, do we need to even program to teach about CT?  What is the role for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) when we consider how Scratch made it easier to teach coding? Have a think about this notion of reducing the friction between people and computers.

Guzdial, M. (2019, April 29). A new definition of Computational Thinking: It’s the Friction that we want to Minimize unless it’s Generative, (2019) Mark Guzdial [Blog]. Retrieved from Computing Education website: https://computinged.wordpress.com/2019/04/29/what-is-computational-thinking-its-the-friction-that-we-want-to-minimize/ <https://computinged.wordpress.com/2019/04/29/what-is-computational-thinking-its-the-friction-that-we-want-to-minimize/>
"computational thinking is about framing problems so that computers can solve them ... To meet Alan Kay's point about generativity, there are some things in computing that we want to teach because they give us new leverage on thinking. We want to teach things that are useful, but not those that are necessary just because we have bad user interfaces." (Guzdial 2019:2)

If you feel brave for a reply, please share your thoughts.

Best of Wishes, Roland Gesthuizen
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