CodeBC’s Computational Thinking Teacher Guide Curriculum provides videos, weblinks, lesson ideas, vocabulary and outlines for the key concepts of computational thinking: Logical Reasoning, Algorithmic Thinking, Problem Decomposition, Abstraction, Patterns & Generalization, and Evaluation.
The importance of computational thinking comes from an ever growing reach to problem solving! Through computational thinking, students can focus their energy on problem solving incites rather than data collection, allowing them to solve evermore complex problems. This approach to problem solving is everywhere and happening every day from when we choose what meals to cook to determining how to fix a broken bicycle, and it is important to provide our students with experiences practicing the different skills they will need. The biggest problems we will face require an interdisciplinary approach, and with these skills, our students will be future ready citizens who can contribute to society in a bigger and more meaningful ways.
Logical Reasoning: Using logical reasoning, students are able to determine the steps for decomposing problems and making sense of the patterns they see in order to find their way to the solutions. They will be able to determine the code to their problem, evaluate their code and the codes of others, find bugs, and suggest solutions.
Evaluation: Students need to learn to evaluate their work and thinking throughout the entire process and after they are done. We can help develop their evaluation skills through self or peer assessment, by providing sets of criteria against which they can evaluate the success of their work, and by providing anecdotal feedback.
Problem Decomposition: Within problems there are often easier problems. Students need to know how to break down these big problems into solvable, manageable, subproblems, which they can put back together to synthesize a final solution. Problem decomposition happens all the time, from composing a song, to solving a crime, to understanding complex machines. Not only do students need opportunities to see how problems are broken down, but they need opportunities to break problems down themselves. There are great activities to support problem decomposition like Scratch Bee-Bot and Google Divide and Conquer.
Pattern Recognition: Pattern recognition is a huge part of the intermediate maths curriculum and for good reason – patterns exist everywhere and help us solve even the most complex problems. In computational thinking, we may find patterns that exist between subproblems that can help us solve the big problem. Identifying patterns is extremely important for coding, including in computer science, which is a major area of discipline in today’s professional job market. Once you have and understand a pattern, problem solving can be streamlined and finding solutions can become easier. The more complex the problem, the likelihood of having more complex patterns, so practicing making, finding, using and manipulating patterns is incredibly important in our classrooms.
As a teacher, I feel it is my duty to ensure that my student are provided with many varying opportunities to practice these skills! CodeBC, Curriki and Google all provide many lesson ideas that can be easily used in the classroom. Curriki even has many resources available in French and for offline practice. The exploration of these resources has made me recognize the importance of cross curricular problem solving practice and I believe that by combining computational thinking and expeditionary learning, I will be able to best support my students!
Visit: http://codebc.ca/ & https://www.curriki.org/
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