Page 20 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

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Chapter 1
• Generalizing and transferring this problem-solving process to a wide variety of problems.
In addition to this definition, they touch upon necessities for students’ learning of CT and add:
These skills are supported and enhanced by a number of dispositions or attitudes that are essential dimensions of CT. These dispositions or attitudes include:
• Confidence in dealing with complexity
• Persistence in working with difficult problems
• Tolerance for ambiguity
• The ability to deal with open-ended problems
• The ability to communicate and work with others to achieve a common
goal or solution.
Furthermore, a vocabulary of CT is supplied, describing CT in terms of its core concepts: data collection, data analysis, data representation, problem decomposition, abstraction, algorithms & procedures, automation, simulation and parallelization (CSTA Computational Thinking Task Force, 2011).
This view of CT as a problem-solving process puts emphasis on the construction of a computational solution for a given problem after that problem is expressed in computational terms.
While this definition is intended to portray CT across disciplines and is by no means meant to be limited to CS, there are also initiatives to define CT specifically with CS in mind.
The Carnegie Mellon Center for Computational Thinking (CMCCT), with its mission to develop computing research, developed a CT framework describing CT as consisting of three aspects: making use of abstraction and modeling, thinking algorithmically, and understanding scale (Carnegie Mellon Center for Computational Thinking, 2010).
Brennan and Resnick observed activities of Scratch programmers and derived a definition of CT through its three dimensions: computational concepts (i.e., sequences, loops, events, parallelism, conditionals, operators and data), computational practices (i.e. being incremental and iterative, testing and debugging, reusing and remixing, and, abstracting and modularizing), and computational perspectives (i.e. expressing, connecting and questioning) (Brennan & Resnick, 2012).
In an effort to find common ground in various definitions of CT, Selby and Woollard (2013) describe CT as “a focused approach to problem solving,