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 only attend conferences whose names are acronyms. (Culture) | Culture | Matthew C. Judd |
| You're still wondering who these "user" people are. (Usability, Culture) | Culture | Matthew C. Judd |
| You've made a purchase because you knew the software/hardware behind it was open source. (Open Source) | Culture | Matthew C. Judd |
| You think a paper titled "Computing Humor Considered Harmful: No Silver Bullet" is funny. (Titles, History) | Culture | Matthew C. Judd |
| If someone tells you that they're chopping up a log and you don't assume that wood or an axe is involved. | Culture | Colleen Lewis |
| If you're trying to put together iTunes "smart" playlists and really enjoy the features that allow you to have "all" or "any" of a filter criteria set up, as well as membership (or not) in other playlists which allows you to easily create a very complicated filter "expression", similar for apple's address book groups & mail smart folders. (Boolean, Set Theory) | boolean set theory | Dan Garcia |
| In response to a gleeful "Trick or Treat!" from 8-year old ghouls and goblins, you hand out some candy then hope that they meant exclusive__ or and not inclusive__ or!! (Boolean Logic) | boolean set theory | Dan Garcia |
| In response to being upset when your cat Flo keeps bringing dead animals into your house, you build a vision system to take a snapshot of her and unlock the door when her mouth is empty. http://www.quantumpicture.com/Flo_Control/flo_control.htm (Applications) | applications | Dan Garcia |
| You're a fan of the codebreaking game Mastermind and understand that there is a guessing algorithm that can guarantee that it can be solved in a fixed number of guesses (currently it's 5). (Worst Case Analysis, Minimax) | algorithms/recursion | Dan Garcia |
| You realize that if someone says "ohyay" in piglatin to you, you can't figure out whether they meant "oh" or "yoh." (Many to one Mapping) | algorithms/recursion | Dan Garcia |
| If you've ever decided between two recipes based on whether one was faster, had less cooking time and more prep, or just produced tastier results. (Algorithms) | algorithms/recursion | Dan Garcia |
| You are thankful "99 bottles of beer on the wall" is sung iteratively instead of recursively. (Interation vs Recursion) | algorithms/recursion | Collen Lewis |
| You listened to the Pete Seeger song "Where have all the Flowers Gone" (at http://www.arlo.net/resources/lyrics/flowers-gone.shtml ) or the Traditional "There's a Hole in the Bucket" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_hole_in_the_bucket) and thought, "hey wait a minute, that could go on forever!" (Infinite Loops) | algorithms/recursion | Dan Garcia |
| You can always solve the "guess the 1-100 number, tell me whether I'm high or low" in 7 guesses or fewer. (Binary Search) | algorithms/recursion | Dan Garcia |
| You can always win an "eenie meenie minie moe" choice by quickly scanning the number playing (call that n), doing 16 (the number of 'beats' in the rhyme) mod n, and starting at the right place. Works every time! | algorithms/recursion | Dan Garcia |
| You can solve the Chinese Rings puzzle (http://puzzlemuseum.com/month/picm06/200612chinese3.htm) and you've found something remarkably elegant and repetitive about the solution. (Recursion) | algorithms/recursion | Dan Garcia |
| 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 |
| It bothers you that the directions on your shampoo are "Lather. Rinse. Repeat." | algorithms/recursion | Robert McCartney |
| 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 |
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