Computational Thinking

A lesson for people who want to learn about programming, but do not want to learn how to program.

• Wat is computation thinking?
  • Important elements [3]
    • Logical Thinking
    • Algorithmic Thinking
    • Efficient Solutions
    • Scientific Thinking
    • Innovative Thinking
  • Concepts and approaches of the computational thinker [4]
    • Concepts
      • Logic - predicting and analysing
      • Algorithms - making steps and rules
      • Decomposition - breaking down into parts
      • Patterns - spotting and using similarities
      • Abstraction - removing unnecessary detail
      • Evaluation - making judgment
    • Approaches
      • Tinkering - experimenting and playing
      • Creating - designing and making
      • Debugging - finding and fixing errors
      • Persevering - keep going
      • Collaborating - working together
• Why is it useful?
• What is the goal of the lesson?

The idea is to explain computational concepts by collectively solving puzzles from the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) [1, 2].

What computational concepts should be explored?

• Algorithm

Types of problems [1]

• Assembly required
• Black box
• Broken machine
• Troublemaker
• Jabberwock
• Combinations

Other requirements

• Problems should be self contained (not require additional knowledge)

[1] Littell, Patrick, et al. "Introducing Computational Concepts in a Linguistics Olympiad." ACL 2013 (2013): 18. http://cs.jhu.edu/~jason/papers/littell+al.tnlp13.pdf

[2] http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/practice.html

[3] http://www.cs4fn.org/computationalthinking/

[4] http://barefootcas.org.uk/barefoot-primary-computing-resources/concepts/computational-thinking/