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Computational Thinking

About

Digital Skills are becoming ubiquitous. Problem Solving, Critical Thinking and Analysis, Technology Design and Programming, Reasoning and ideation have been identified as some of the top digital skills that are relevant for a person to be successful in the digital economy. Denning has argued that not only is Computational Thinking a fundamental skill used by and useful for all but is a practice that is central to all sciences, not just computer science.

Worldover K-12 computing education has moved away from digital literacy and technology learning to a computational thinking curriculum. To address the skills demand created by the industrial revolution, the Sciences and Mathematics were included in the school curriculum in the early 19th century.

We submit that to address the skills demands for the digital economy, computational thinking be taught at par with Mathematics and Sciences. National Education Policy 2020 has recommended that CT be introduced into the curriculum, taught to all students and be given greater emphasis along with Mathematics.

CT

Why Computational Thinking

Computational Thinking is often mistakenly equated either to computer technology/digital literacy or to programming. CT has a much wider scope. So what exactly is computational thinking? We define CT as a skill that promotes a unique way of thinking about problems, that uses the power of logic, algorithm, abstraction, and precision.

It imparts in its learners competencies required to solve problems that involve methods to decompose the problem into smaller manageable sub problems, identifying the right abstractions so as to deal with scale and complexity, finding existing patterns or models that can be adapted, building an algorithm to solve the problem and in case of multiple solutions, analysing the solutions on multiple parameters to identify the one that best meets the given situation.