Ed Tech Magazine – Meghan Bogardus Cortez
“Computational thinking — thinking like a computer and using concepts of computer science to solve problems — is one approach that teachers might already be using without even knowing it. Sheena Vaidyanathan, a sixth grade computer science teacher in California’s Los Altos School District, says computational thinking is contained in most elements of problem solving that educators are constantly teaching their students. “We are teaching computational thinking concepts as early as kindergarten when we teach students to process things with steps,” she says. “We just don’t think of it as related to computer science.” Vaidyanathan says she believes teaching computational thinking is a more important and accessible step than teaching coding; learning to solve problems, she says, is more critical than getting bogged down in the specific details of the computer language used to solve them.”(more)