Teach / Learn Computational Thinking before Programming
Ajay S. Bhāgwat (??? ?????)
Ed-tech Evangelist, OBE and CBME Educationalist, OBE advisor to top Universities in India
First year engineering students have a course called "Fundamentals of Programming Languages (FPL)". A student who failed in this course told me that he never wrote code as part of exercises for this course. As a pedagogy, the teacher showed samples of some programs to communicate what a piece of code looks like. I felt this as if the teacher is taking the students to a jungle safari; if they see any wild animals, they are lucky.
FPL is a course for all students of all branches of engineering as a part of first year engineering (FE). I am not sure what the objective is to teach FPL (and that too in jungle safari mode) to non-Computer science / engineering (non-CE) students. Please share what the reason is to teach FPL to non-CE FE students.
In my humble opinion, what is needed is teaching students what "computational thinking" is, prior to FPL. "Computational thinking is the thought processes involved in formulating a problem and expressing its solution(s) in such a way that a computer—human or machine—can effectively carry out". [Ref - wikipedia]
Teaching computational thinking can be extremely entertaining for teachers as well as students. There are easy-to-use, entertaining environments like Scratch, which helps you focus on "design" and "problem-solving" without wasting time on "syntax errors".
There is a book on Amazon which can used as a text-book by colleges to achieve above goals. Here is the link
Students can learn Computational thinking as well computer science concepts by writing programs such as:
- Games
- Puzzles
- Interactive Animation
Once a foundation to learn commercial-scale programming languages is laid, the students may want to learn FPL.
Please share your thoughts and ask questions if any.
Principal Consultant-Trainer
7 年As you already mentioned, students must be introduced to "computational thinking" before FPL. However, albeit on a jungle safari mode, I think the FPL still helps all students. For one, there's no single work domain nowadays, that doesn't employ computers and software. Secondly, to further explore the thoughts you gained at computational thinking, you must know how, when and where to exercise them...which is possible only by furthering your language skills. Finally, a casual participation on a jungle safari could well serve as an inspiration to a student and push him into learning more about the jungle and its inhabitants...often times, even better than those who make focused efforts at their studies.