"Computational thought"? Yeah, sure, and that'll look great on a CV...When the interviewer asks you what programming languages you know fluently and professionally, "computational thought" will come in handy for sure. /s
As a note to anyone who is still in high school and is wanting to go into software design, you should get learning programming languages ASAP, and as many as you can. By college you're too busy, it's too late, and you'll find it incredibly hard when you start university to keep up with the comp. sci. course.
Not sure it is meant to be taken that literally because there isn't a subject called computational thought you can study at the moment anyway. The point of the article is to reframe the purpose of teaching programming away from the specifics of any particular programming language towards the general skill of computational thinking that can be applied to a wide range of disciplines. I think this is a very good point.
That said I think it would be a step backwards if ever a discipline of computational thinking was created that didn't involve actually writing code. One of the best things about programming is that whatever you do actually has to be executable and work. We should never lose this. In fact I'd argue that over time more disciplines should be expected to produce functional programs to demonstrate their ideas if not actually produce useful programs.
Both of these points highlight the importance of increasing our understanding of the relationship between ideas and computation and programming languages and techniques used to express them.
away from the specifics of any particular programming language
But no comp. sci. course or any other computer-related course will teach you just one language. Also, comp. sci. courses already include lessons on "computational thought", i.e. understanding of object-based languages, etc.. The article and what it proposes is totally useless and obselete/irrelavent.
6 comments
0 u/insert_name 06 Apr 2016 14:36
"Computational thought"? Yeah, sure, and that'll look great on a CV...When the interviewer asks you what programming languages you know fluently and professionally, "computational thought" will come in handy for sure. /s
As a note to anyone who is still in high school and is wanting to go into software design, you should get learning programming languages ASAP, and as many as you can. By college you're too busy, it's too late, and you'll find it incredibly hard when you start university to keep up with the comp. sci. course.
0 u/the-cats-nipples 06 Apr 2016 16:53
Not sure it is meant to be taken that literally because there isn't a subject called computational thought you can study at the moment anyway. The point of the article is to reframe the purpose of teaching programming away from the specifics of any particular programming language towards the general skill of computational thinking that can be applied to a wide range of disciplines. I think this is a very good point.
That said I think it would be a step backwards if ever a discipline of computational thinking was created that didn't involve actually writing code. One of the best things about programming is that whatever you do actually has to be executable and work. We should never lose this. In fact I'd argue that over time more disciplines should be expected to produce functional programs to demonstrate their ideas if not actually produce useful programs.
Both of these points highlight the importance of increasing our understanding of the relationship between ideas and computation and programming languages and techniques used to express them.
0 u/insert_name 06 Apr 2016 18:54
But no comp. sci. course or any other computer-related course will teach you just one language. Also, comp. sci. courses already include lessons on "computational thought", i.e. understanding of object-based languages, etc.. The article and what it proposes is totally useless and obselete/irrelavent.
0 u/ratsmack 06 Apr 2016 16:37
Sounds like liberal arts or common core programming.