What Is Computational Thinking?
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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 ever wish that the city had put you in charge of their traffic light algorithm. | Colleen Lewis | |
| You refuse to obey the grammatical rules for commas/periods and quotes because it offends your sensibilities. ("ok", instead of "ok,"). (Languages, Parsing) | Dan Garcia | |
| You know there is no 12am or 12pm, there's noon and midnight. On a similar line, you use 24-hour format which solved the whole problem. [0,24) (Numbers, Floating Point) | Dan Garcia | |
| You hire a contractor to fix something in your home, and you don't care whether they hire subcontractors or not as long as it's done well, on time, and for the agreed price. (Functional Abstraction) | Dan Garcia | |
| You hire 1000 people to do a job and know it won't be done 1000 times faster than 1 person. (Concurrency) | Dan Garcia | |
| You're cutting the plastic 6-pack can holder thingy to remove all loops otherwise it could get caught around a seagull's neck, and you find it interesting to calculate the minimum number of cuts it might take. (Topology, Graph Theory) | Dan Garcia | |
| You're sharing a candy bar with some friends and find it fun to design a way that makes it fair for everyone, even if all are selfish and some are cheaters! (Algorithms, Game Theory) | Dan Garcia | |
| 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 |
| You marvel at how your nephew can now compute the shortest path around the table to the toy. | AI | Colleen Lewis |
| 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 |