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"My favorite is how they think you should teach programming without teaching “coding”, as if that’s how they learned it." I often wonder about this. In the UK,

"My favorite is how they think you should teach programming without teaching “coding”, as if that’s how they learned it." I often wonder about this. In the UK, with the drive to get every child 'coding', there are a large number of teachers that constantly talk about how the main skill that we should be teaching is 'Computational Thinking'. I wax and wane back and forth over this topic, in a very chicken and egg way. However, I usually end up coming to the conclusion that learning computational thinking is great, but you need to know how to code (i.e. learn the basic syntax of a language) before you can possibly learn how to think computationally. I would be very interested to hear the opinions of actual developers, as to their opinions on the topic.

blt 11y ago
There's no better way to improve your "computational thinking" than to write code. There are other good ways, but writing code is the best way.
sirclueless 11y ago
I don't think these things are all that different, in the very early stages. The very first part of computational thinking is understanding that you can make a very specific and precise procedure to accomplish a task. If a student is at an age where reading and writing is easy, then learning the syntax of a language is a fine way to accomplish this. The student will spend a lot of time with each finicky word and symbol to make the computer behave, and while they may not recognize that they are defining an abstract procedure, the result is hopefully some intuition that the computer is a very predictable and reliable machine that does exactly what the code says, even if it's not what you meant. With exposure to more languages and by writing more programs, hopefully a student begins to recognize patterns and abstractions in their code, and that's the point at which they become real computational thinkers. If a student isn't ready for that, there are still fun things to try. One cute one I've seen is "program your parent" exercise at a workshop. The child can make their parent move one step forwards or back, turn left or right, pick up and put down an object, and put one thing inside another. Can they make their parent pour a glass of juice? Or put a lego back in the box? I don't think there is a chicken and egg problem here, because learning to make a dumb machine perform a task by following a procedure is the essence of computational thinking. Learning the basic syntax of a language is probably the most efficacious way to experience this for many students of many ages, even if the explicit goal is "do well on an AP test" or something mundane.

blt 11y ago

There's no better way to improve your "computational thinking" than to write code. There are other good ways, but writing code is the best way.

sirclueless 11y ago

I don't think these things are all that different, in the very early stages. The very first part of computational thinking is understanding that you can make a very specific and precise procedure to accomplish a task. If a student is at an age where reading and writing is easy, then learning the syntax of a language is a fine way to accomplish this. The student will spend a lot of time with each finicky word and symbol to make the computer behave, and while they may not recognize that they are defining an abstract procedure, the result is hopefully some intuition that the computer is a very predictable and reliable machine that does exactly what the code says, even if it's not what you meant. With exposure to more languages and by writing more programs, hopefully a student begins to recognize patterns and abstractions in their code, and that's the point at which they become real computational thinkers. If a student isn't ready for that, there are still fun things to try. One cute one I've seen is "program your parent" exercise at a workshop. The child can make their parent move one step forwards or back, turn left or right, pick up and put down an object, and put one thing inside another. Can they make their parent pour a glass of juice? Or put a lego back in the box? I don't think there is a chicken and egg problem here, because learning to make a dumb machine perform a task by following a procedure is the essence of computational thinking. Learning the basic syntax of a language is probably the most efficacious way to experience this for many students of many ages, even if the explicit goal is "do well on an AP test" or something mundane.