Abstract
Over its short disciplinary history, computing has seen a stunning number of descriptions of the field's characteristic ways of thinking and practicing, under a large number of different labels. One of the more recent variants, notably in the context of K-12 education, is "computational thinking", which became popular in the early 2000s, and which has given rise to many competing views of the essential character of CT. This article analyzes CT from the perspective of computing's disciplinary ways of thinking and practicing, as expressed in writings of computing's pioneers. The article describes six windows into CT from a computing perspective: its intellectual origins and justification, its aims, and the central concepts, techniques, and ways of thinking in CT that arise from those different origins. The article also presents a way of analyzing CT over different dimensions, such as in terms of breadth vs. depth, specialization vs. generalization, and in terms of skill progression from beginner to expert. Those different views have different aims, theoretical references, conceptual frameworks, and origin stories, and they justify their intellectual essence in different ways.
Highlights
Little or nothing is said about operating systems, networks, concurrency, memory management, information sharing, and information protection – concepts often seen as more advanced forms of Computational Thinking (CT) for which beginners are not ready
The latest CT wave has done a remarkable job bringing the need for K-12 computing education into the global limelight
We have argued that much of the fog would disperse if we broaden CT’s perspective to include advanced CT
Summary
Scientists who found computing to be materially different from the traditional ways of theory and experiment used the term “computational thinking” to describe the mental disciplines needed for this new kind of science They discovered that many natural phenomena can be understood by modeling them as information processes and using computing to simulate them. This essay is aimed at computing educators interested in situating CT ideas in the broader picture of computing as a discipline and in the sciences in general It describes computational thinking as an extension of several centuries-long traditions in science, mathematics, and engineering, and it describes how many ideas today labeled “CT” have been presented, in different forms, in many other sciences much before the birth of the modern computer. The essay explains the ways in which computing really is a new and unique way of looking at problemsolving and automation, as well as of interpreting phenomena in the world
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