21st Century Learning and Teaching

One might think that computational thinking is somehow only relevant to STEM education. But it’s not true. Computational thinking is relevant across the whole curriculum. To social studies. To language arts. To music. To art. Even to sports. In every one of these areas there are very powerful—and often very clarifying—things that can be done with computation and computational thinking.

For instance, you can talk about a Shakespeare play and try to get a general sense of the flow in it. Well, with computational thinking you can imagine creating a social network for the play (for instance, who “knows” who through being in the same scene). And pretty soon you have a nice summary, that’s a place to launch from in talking about the nuances of the play and its themes.

Imagine you’re talking about different language families. Well, you can just take some words and use WordTranslation to translate them into hundreds of languages. Then you could make a dendrogram to show how the forms of those words cluster in different languages—and you can discover the Indo-European language family.

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http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?tag=Computational+Thinking