Computational Thinking in schools.

Reflections based on article “Computational Thinking Manifesto” by Jeannette M. Wing.

Computational Thinking can be applied, practiced and enhanced in the educational world.

Students need to benefit from the virtues of technology but at the same time avoid its dangers:

• Students should benefit from being able to find information online, but need to be told how to reference it so that it is not considered plagiarism. Every course I teach I find an “innocent” cheater, a student who is guilty of plagiarism, but is so naïve, careless or unknowledgeable that shows traces of his copying so clearly that gets caught easily.
•  Students should benefit from collaborating and publishing online, but need to be aware of malware, social ethics and other dangers. In my lessons I use collaborating tools such as google documents, which several students can modify online. My students find it useful but at the same time encounter often inconvenience such as the lack of total control over the work produced.
•  Students should benefit from being able to store all their work in their pockets, but need to be aware that technology is often subject to failure. I encourage my students to backup their work using an external drive (usb or cloud-based) a copy in a DVD, but I find that they rarely do that. Sometimes I have to “force” them to have a backup copy by asking them to duplicate their work online and share it with me or simply by sending themselves an email with the file.
•  Students should be aware of the benefits of using technology but also be aware of its limitations and how our human brains can often do things faster and better than computers. In my mathematics courses I often hear from students that since their Graphic Display Calculators can do any mathematical calculation they don’t really need to study mathematics.