There’s been quite a lot of material on computational thinking as part of the Computing curriculum over the last few years, and I’ve been teaching some of it to the 1st year students at Stirling University for a number of years. A recent post in the British Computer Society magazine website on Computational thinking set me looking back through what I wrote about this area, in preparation for giving this part of our 1st year course. What we did was to teach some Java programming, and then put in two lectures on this area: we reckoned that trying to teach computational thinking without exposure to programming first would mean that the students would have no context. Re-reading my article made me decide to put it online So here it is: Two Lectures on Computational Thinking: a brief essay, as written in October 2012.
It’s as relevant now as it was then – indeed, I gave essentially the same two lectures just two weeks ago as part of the CSCU9A1 module at Stirling. The lectures themselves are hidden: if anyone’s interested, I can supply them – though they essentially follow the essay above.
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