What Is Computational Thinking?
Overview
Computational Thinking (CT) has been articulated as a “fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists.” Almost all agree with the lofty goals of the initiative, to teach humanity the ability to see the world through the sharpened eyes of a computer scientist. However, what does it really mean to be a computational thinker? While it is helpful to see examples that show we’re already engaged in CT (e.g., using a backpack is pre-fetching and caching), it is perhaps more valuable to see everyday situations that are transformed when viewed through a computational thinker’s trained eyes (e.g., writing dates as YYYY-MM-DD so they’ll sort correctly). We hope to present enough examples to satisfy a growing chorus of those who need more grounding, using a unique delivery format.
SIGCSE '10
Abstract  |
Daniel D. Garcia  |
Colleen M. Lewis  |
John P. Dougherty  |
Matthew C. Jadud  |
| Jokes | Category | Author |
|---|---|---|
| You do not stack your clean dishes, you queue them; same for clean clothes. | datastructures | John P. Dougherty |
| You realize that Three Dog Night had it wrong; "One" is not the loneliest number, "Zero" is! | math-y-ness/binary | John P. Dougherty |
| You realize "parkway" and "driveway" are great object names, but have been used incorrectly for years! (OOP) | data representation | John P. Dougherty |
| You feel thirteen and fifteen are just unfair; they should be "threeteen" and "fiveteen." And what's the deal with ten, eleven and twelve? They should be "teen", "one teen" and "twoteen"! Actually, Chinese did it right. E.g., Twelve is One ten two. One hundred twenty five is "one hundred two ten five") (Consistent Naming) | data representation | John P. Dougherty |
| Instead of making dinner seven times a week, you make one large meal and reheat for the week. (and making start up costs constant instead of linear) | optimization | John P. Dougherty |
| You start the second load of laundry as soon as the first load is done; in fact, you actually start drying the first load before you start washing the second since drying takes longer in the pipeline. (Pipelining) | optimization | John P. Dougherty |
| You force your software calculator to use RPN. (Stacks) | datastructures | Matthew C. Judd |
| If you've ever taken a friend's chop stick, caused everyone's dinner to get cold while you explain the glories of the Dining Philosopher's problem, and then discovered that most students of philosophy like their take away warm, thank-you-very-much. (Concurrency) | algorithms/recursion | Matthew C. Judd |
| You look at an onion and weep because it doesn't have a base case. (Recursion) | algorithms/recursion | Matthew C. Judd |
| You've sung the song "This is the song that never ends," and realized it must implement tail calls correctly, or it would overflow. (Recursion, Compilation) | algorithms/recursion | Matthew C. Judd |
| You think "99,99A" is a valid value on your car's odometer. (Hex) | math-y-ness/binary | Matthew C. Judd |
| If you've ever fixed a bug and made things worse. (Bugs, Testing) | debugging | Matthew C. Judd |
| You look at your 5-month-old and wonder whether you could train a neural network to exhibit the same behavior. (AI) | AI | Matthew C. Judd |
| If you've ever thought that taking the first car offered by the rental agency was redundant redundant. Get it? First car? waka waka waka (LISP, First/Car) | PL | Matthew C. Judd |
| You can name more than 5 Scheme implementations. (Languages) | PL, culture | Matthew C. Judd |
| You voted in a Scheme standardization process. (Languages) | PL | Matthew C. Judd |
| You'd rather debate the relative merits of prefix-vs-infix notation than talk about politics. (Languages) | PL | Matthew C. Judd |
| You know at least one "shoot yourself in the foot" joke. (Languages) | PL | Matthew C. Judd |
| You think debating prefix-vs-infix notation is politics. (Languages, Holy Wars) | PL | Matthew C. Judd |
| You applauded during "Jurasic Park" when the line "Hey, I know this... It's UNIX" was uttered. (Pop Culture, UNIX) | Pop culture | Matthew C. Judd |
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