Computational Thinking for Educators


It's been a while since I first wrote posts about computational thinking and the resources available since those first posts have grown tremendously. One of my favorite ones for educators is the Computational Thinking for Educators course with Google available here.  While the original course is finished, the modules are still available on the website. Here is a brief video introducing the course:


What I love about it is that it really brings computational thinking (CT)into the world of educators. Through simulations and tasks that participants can interact with, learners see that CT can be applied to various subject areas. For example, in the 'traveling problem,' learners experiment with finding the shortest, most efficient path on an actual Google map with the goal of exploring algorithms. There is the opportunity to explore and find patterns in music using an activity created using Pencil Code. With Turtle geometry, learners have the opportunity to apply CT while finding patterns in geometry.

I found this course is an incredible way to not only learn about CT, but to experience it and reflect on how to apply it to my own teaching practice. The final task of the course was to create a lesson plan that integrates CT - in other words, applying the course content to teaching real kids. There is a collection of CT lessons created by educators available here. It is possible to search for the relevant subject area and age range to make it easier to find lesson just right for anyone to use and bring CT to their classroom. CT is truly for everyone, everywhere.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Operators And Separators In C Language Operators in C Language:

Below are various operators available in C Programming language.  They are used to perform operations arithmetic, logical, relational, bitwise, assignment, etc.  We will see more about all the below operators in details in the forth coming chapters. Operators Name Of Operators [ ] ( ) . -> ++ -- Array subscript Function Call Structure reference Structure dereference Postfix increment/Postfix decrement ++ -- + - ! ~ (type) *  & sizeof Prefix increment/Prefix decrement Unary plus/Unary minus Logical negation/One's complement Typecast operator Pointer dereference/Address of Size of type/variable in bytes *  /  % Multiplication/Division/Modulo + - Addition/Subtraction <<   >> Bitwise left shift/ Bitwise right shift <    > <= >= Comparison less than/Comparision greater than Comparison less than or equal to Comparison greater than or equal to ==   != Comparison equal to/Comparison not equal to & Bitwise AND ^ Bitwise XOR
Read more

Difference between asterisk and ampersand operators in c

Address Operator (& - Ampersand): Returns address of the given variable.  Consider the following example, int *ptr, var = 10; ptr = &var; ptr = &var sets the address of the variable var to pointer ptr.  & is also called as reference operator. Let us try to understand the purpose of reference operator using the following example program.   #include <stdio.h>   int main() {         int var = 10, *ptr;         /* assigning address of variable var to pointer ptr */         ptr = &var;         /* printing the address of the variable var */         printf("Address of var is 0x%x\n", &var);         /* printing the value of pointer ptr */         printf("Value of ptr is 0x%x\n", ptr);         return 0;   }   Output:   jp@jp-VirtualBox:~/$ ./a.out   Address of var is 0xbfdf202c   Value of ptr is 0xbfdf202c Indirection Operator('*' - asterisk): The dereference operator is an unary operator which returns the value of
Read more