I first want to thank both of my professors for facilitating this amazing mini-conference. I had so much fun and learned so much through other people. The best part of the conference is that I got to share my passion, which is teaching coding to children! Teaching coding can help children develop their computational thinking skills. These skills are integral to their success in this technology-focused future! Below I included simple paper research that I have done before, which briefly describes the history of Computational thinking. Hopefully, after reading, you can be on board with computational thinking too!

Computational Thinking (CT) had been researched since the 1950s, it was referred to as “agrammatic thinking”, which uses algorithms to produce an output to a given input [1]. Back in the 1980s, Papert [2] emphasized that learning how to program can change the way people think. Researchers used CT as an explanation for this statement and suggested that learning how to program can better a person’s CT skills due to its analytical nature. It was also thought that CT’s analytical component is close to mathematical thinking, engineering thinking, and scientific thinking. CT is not only useful for programming professionals but everyone in society. CT describes the idea of using concepts fundamentals to understand human behaviors, solve problems, and design systems [3]. Furthermore, Wing called attention to the fact that CT can influence many different disciplines such as statistics and biology [3]. García-Peñalvo [4] described CT as “computational thinking can be defined as the application of high level of abstraction and an algorithmic approach to solve any kind of problems (2016),” which translates to the fact that computational thinking is not only useful to programmers, but it is useful for many situations. Wing not only highlighted CT’s importance in research, but his paper also sparked interest in many educational institutes all over the world, and thus experiments surrounding this topic increased. This eventually led education professionals and governments to take an interest in this topic. To further investigate this, Heintz found that computer programming course availability has increased drastically in many countries [1]. Many Figure 1: Relationships of CT [5]. Picture from [5] 2 are still confused about a set definition of CT and not all researchers have agreed on a set definition yet. In an attempt to explain CT clearly, Zhang and Nouri [5] described the relationship between computing, programming, CT, and Problem-solving by reviewing Scratch-based CT experiments. Sometimes researchers overlook the importance of CT by stating creative thinking and critical skills are already sufficient, however, the purpose of CT is not to replace these skills but to intergrade itself into the lives of children and therefore allow children to use these tools in situations that may come in the future [6]. Some have argued that programming is not necessary to teach computational thinking and that teaching programming to foster CT could have an opposite effect on children as some find the topic unnecessary and boring.

References

[1] Heintz, F., Mannila, L., & Färnqvist, T. (2016). A review of models for
introducing computational thinking, computer science and computing in K-12
education. In 2016 I.E. Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)
Proceedings (pp. 1–9)
[2] Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. New
York: Basic Books.
[3] Wing, J. M. (2006). Computational thinking. Communications of the ACM,
49(3), 33. doi:10.1145/1118178.1118215
[4] López, A. R., & García-Peñalvo, F. J. (2016). Relationship of knowledge to learn
in programming methodology and evaluation of computational thinking.
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Technological
Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality – TEEM ’16.
doi:10.1145/3012430.3012499
[5] Zhang, L., & Nouri, J. (2019). A systematic review of learning computational
thinking through Scratch in K-9. Computers & Education, 141, 103607.
doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103607
[6] Cuny, J., Snyder, L., & Wing, J.M. (2010). Demystifying computational thinking
for noncomputer scientists. Unpublished manuscript in progress, referenced in
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~CompThink/resources/TheLinkWing.pdf