Ideas and resources in computational thinking

Mateja Rojko (2012) Ideas and resources in computational thinking. EngD thesis.

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Abstract

Computational thinking is a paradigm of solving problems, designing systems and understanding human behavior by drawing on the fundamental concepts of computer science. The foundation for computational thinking is abstraction - abstracting concepts from cases and evaluating and selecting the appropriate abstraction. Computational thinking has already influenced a research in many science and engineering disciplines. In education, it is part of mathematics, biology, chemistry, economics, finance, languages and arts, music and sport. Through the games we can teach children the basic concepts of computer science and computational thinking. We present characteristics and methods of computational thinking, such as decomposition, abstraction and design of algorithms. We describe areas affected by the computational thinking, but we focus on their involvment in K – 12 curriculum. We describe some examples, such as robotic surgery in the medicine and »shotgun« algorithm in biology. We create a Flash animation, which tends to teach children merge sort in an interesting and simple manner.

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