Barr, D., Harrison, J. & Conery, L. (2011, March/April) Computational Thinking: A Digital Age Skill For Everyone
In the article Computational Thinking: A Digital age was written by a group of people including two teachers one math and a former elementary school teacher that now works for ISTE. Also the CEO of ITSE. It is made essentially as an introduction and advertisement to teachers and school administration such as superintendents and Assistant Superintendents of Curriculum to use this strategy in the classroom. This article also aims to make computational thinking accessible to educators by making a certain definition for the strategy. The strategy involves trying to solve problems, design systems and understand human behavior drawing on the concepts of computer science. So can a human adopt processes of solving problems in a manner of and using of computers?
The significance of the article is that it does offer a new way of thinking, learning and teaching in the classroom. It is a strategy that teachers can use doing many different types of assignments due to the fact that the strategy is scientifically based. I have learned that getting the students to break down items that they are doing into components and compiling data is definitely a useable strategy in the classroom. The concept is vague even though the article gives examples they are not very clear as to how to implement the strategy. The examples need more depth as to what the students are trying to accomplish. Also, some of the examples do not use any hard data as the strategy suggests. So I would like to know if this strategy really usable for all subjects.
As a teacher I will have to get more data on how to apply the strategy however, there are many aspects that I can use and put together that would mimic this strategy. In history there are a lot of instances where hard data will be useful to solve historical problems. Social science in general uses this computational process in government and economics. This strategy will work great in a science and math class for sure. In fact, their first example on deforestation shows how well it can work.
Article taken from http://www.iste.org/store/publications/downloads/l-l
It was very interesting to read what this article is about because I did not read this one. I liked reading your views on the subject too. I like to see you thinking about using what you learned in the article to when you become a teacher in History.
ReplyDeleteInteresting to read about this article -- kind of fills a void for people like me who are so new to the computer age. I did appreciate that you showed how implementation of the strategy was lacking in enough information for you to implement it.
ReplyDeleteI had a bit of a hard time understanding what this article entails from your blog. I guess its about breaking down information into learning size chunks, but this is just speculation. Since this was not my article to read, I could have used a little bit more detail or explination on the point of the article. Sorry, it just didn't come across to me.
ReplyDelete