[Yr7-10it] [Oz-teachers] CT and HCI

[ken price]

I'm with Mark Guzdial on this, at least for the school sector - we're
teaching an approach to thinking, and it is this that students will still
find useful in 20 years' time. It's very practical to teach this via
computer programming, in much the same way as some other subject areas are
effective ways to encourage other specific forms of thinking.

At the same time there are elements of the programming fraternity who will
maintain that Scratch and other drag and drop programming interfaces are
"not real programming".  I suspect once there were people who claimed
programming in a text-based language that has a vague resemblance to
English was "not real programming" either, as real programming would
require directly loading binary values into memory locations manually...

There is also the belief in some quarters of the IT industry that the only
"real programming" is what takes place in their own workplace. This is
perhaps more understandable in some sense, but doesn't take into account
the purposes of compulsory education. We don't teach poetry in order to
fill a demand for poets in the workplace.

Ken


On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 9:43 PM Roland Gesthuizen <rgesthuizen at gmail.com>
wrote:

> This is a bit deep but I thought to share it here. A preservice teacher
> with a solid CS background remarked a couple of weeks ago about the
> maturity of junior secondary students to think about coding and
> computational thinking (CT), remarking that there are many pedagogical and
> maturity challenges. I have been reading up about CT and the benefits to
> students, even if they don't go on to study CS.
>
> Lu, J. J., & Fletcher, G. H. L. (2009). Thinking About Computational
> Thinking. *Proceedings of the 40th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer
> Science Education*, 260–264. https://doi.org/10.1145/1508865.1508959
>
> Much of the recent thinking comes from this discussion paper by Wing that
> points out the unplugged nature of CT, that it goes beyond just the
> hardware and software (and perhaps even the programming). This is quite
> readable at 2 pages and well worth a glance.
>
> Wing, J. (2006). Computational thinking. *Communications of the ACM*, *49*(3),
> 33–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/1118178.1118215
>
> "Computational thinking is reformulating a seemingly difficult problem
> into one we know how to solve, perhaps by reduction, embedding,
> transformation, or simulation ... Computational thinking is thinking
> recursively. It is parallel processing. It is interpreting code as data
> and data as code... Computational thinking is using abstraction and
> decomposition when attacking a large complex task or designing a large
> complex system. It is separation of concerns. (Wing 2006:33)
>
> The debate is still going on with this recent post that is even
> challenges, do we need to even program to teach about CT?  What is the role
> for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) when we consider how Scratch made it
> easier to teach coding? Have a think about this notion of reducing the
> friction between people and computers.
>
> Guzdial, M. (2019, April 29). A new definition of Computational Thinking:
> It’s the Friction that we want to Minimize unless it’s Generative, (2019)
> Mark Guzdial [Blog]. Retrieved from Computing Education website:
> https://computinged.wordpress.com/2019/04/29/what-is-computational-thinking-its-the-friction-that-we-want-to-minimize/
>
> "computational thinking is about framing problems so that computers can
> solve them ... To meet Alan Kay's point about generativity, there are
> some things in computing that we want to teach because they give us new
> leverage on thinking. We want to teach things that are useful, but not
> those that are necessary just because we have bad user interfaces."
> (Guzdial 2019:2)
>
> If you feel brave for a reply, please share your thoughts.
>
> Best of Wishes, Roland Gesthuizen
>
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-- 
-- 
Dr Ken Price MACS(Snr) CP ACCE Professional Associate.
Immediate Past President, TASITE http://www.tasite.tas.edu.au
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