Information Technology Education

Some define computational thinking in 4 parts and that is how I started my students with computational thinking - decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithms.  There are two other ways of thinking about computational thinking.  One is the one from MIT media lab (Creative Computing) that sees computational thinking composed of computational concepts (sequence, loops, parallelism, events, conditionals, operations, and data - which by the way looks a lot like the Scratch menu), computational practices (being iterative, testing and debugging, reusing and remixing, abstracting and modularizing) and computational perspectives (expressing, connecting, questioning).  This is the framework I have been using to guide my students on their journey into coding. The other definition is the one that had me stumped for a while - it's the one on ISTE's site, with input from CSTA and it is seems simple, at least on the surface: Critical Thinking + Computing Power =...

A resource I have used quite a bit is the Google Exploring Computational Thinking site. They have broken down CT into decomposition, pattern recognition, pattern generalization, and algorithm design.  I really liked how they introduced each part of CT and provided analogies for each one.  For example, they likened decomposition to tasting a dish and figuring out what all the ingredients are in it.  After going through a few examples of CT in action, I thought that it would be good to go more in-depth into each part.  I started with decomposition and had the students brainstorm examples of decomposition in the world around them: -mysteries - because you need to break it down to find clues, or sometimes they are broken down and you need to put the clues together -planning a trip - first you have to find hotel, decide where to go, buy tickets, board the plane, budget -building a house - because it is made up of different rooms -Legos - there is a big model on the front,...

Our school just got a 3-D printer with digitizer, so off I set on how to enter this world of 3-D printing with my students.  When I first told them that we have a 3-D printer, I got some pretty perplexed looks, and then after the silence, questions such as, "You mean it prints 3-D pictures on paper?"  I thought about how I would introduce it to the class and decided to bring them back in time to the 1300s and Black Death: "Fear of the plague paralyzed the times.  It left a shortage of labor, a need for technology to fill the void, and questions, lots of questions, about the meaning of life."  (Joy Hakim, 2005).  We moved ahead to when painters first started painting with perspective.  We read an excerpt from Joy Hakim's The Story of Science together, analyzing and discussing it together. "In Italy, the Polish student Nicolaus Copernicus learns of Columbus's voyage and of others that follow.  He studies some of the new maps.  He also studies an ast...