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're at the Olympics waiting for the Marathon runners to run in the stadium, and you've been waiting for 2, 3, 4, 5 hours and nobody has returned, and you know that writing a program to automatically figure out whether they are JUST ABOUT to return or whether they're NEVER going to return is impossible... (halting problem) | theory | Dan Garcia |
| You're at the Olympics and are impressed with how the 100 m sprinters finish their race faster and faster each year, and wonder out loud whether there is some minimum time that any human could ever run 100 m. (Theory, Lower Bounds) | theory | Dan Garcia |
| You discover an old unlabeled mix tape with songs from 1970, 1980 and 1990 and want to know when the tape was made. You know that the EARLIEST it could be is right AFTER the OLDEST song on the tape (Theory, Lower Bounds) | theory | Dan Garcia |
| You find it fun to try to calculate the minimum number of breaks of a chocolate bar in order to separete its R rows and C columns into RC 1x1 squares! | theory | Dan Garcia |
| 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 |
| You groaned during "Jurasic Park" when the line "Hey, I know this... It's UNIX" was uttered, because you realized it was actually IRIX. (Pop Culture, UNIX) | Pop culture | Matthew C. Judd |
| You thought the Bit from Tron was awesome. (pop culture, bitwise ops) | Pop culture | Matthew C. Judd |
| You think "Code Monkey" by Jonathan Coulton is a rock anthem of our generation. (Pop Culture, Industry) | Pop culture | Matthew C. Judd |
| You rooted for the computer in "War Games". (Pop Culture, AI) | Pop culture | Matthew C. Judd |
| You rent "Nim's Island" and are disappointed that the characters never played the game. | Pop culture | Dan Garcia |
| You can name more than 5 Scheme implementations. (Languages) | PL, culture | 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 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 have ever instinctively written a parentheses after writing the word "while". | PL | Colleen Lewis |
| When baking, you use an oven timer which beeps and turns off the oven instead of setting the oven and having to look at the watch every so often. (Polling vs Interrupts) | optimization | Dan Garcia |
| 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 |