However, computational thinking is a difficult concept to operationalize and has many different, conflicting definitions.
Another conceptualization of how students learn computation, computational literacy, presents a more straightforward definition. Computational literacy breaks computational skills into three pillars: material (programming-related), cognitive (translating between material and programming aspects), and social (communicating around computation and results).
In the last seminar, we learned about and became familiar with the computational literacy framework and discussed the three different pillars of computational literacy: cognitive, material, and social.
In this seminar, we will continue to discuss computational literacy. We will talk about some strengths and weaknesses of computational literacy, what kinds of activities fall into the different pillars of computational literacy, compare it to computational thinking frameworks, and discuss implications for different science fields.
Please send us an email for Zoom-invitation.
The bi-weekly ODD seminar series at CCSE
The Open Discussions on Didactics (ODD) is a seminar series on Mondays at 14.15 every other week (odd week numbers).
The seminar will be maximum one hour, often closer to half an hour. It is an informal arena to present and discuss learning theory, educational research and teaching experiences within computational science. To cater to the highly heterogeneous backgrounds and interests of students, teachers and researchers in our environment, we aim for seminars that introduce listeners to new ideas within a broad spectrum of aspects, and that invites reflection and discussion.
Presentations need not be mature and polished - to the contrary we hope that as many as possible wants to share undigested observations and reflections in short presentations of varied form and topics. We hope to have enough contributions to frequently have the meetings as lightning talk sessions, where three different speakers will each give a 5-10-minute presentation followed by discussion.