Computational Thinking Practices: April 2011 Webinar
This is the second of three ScratchEd Webinars dedicated to computational thinking. In this webinar, Mitch Resnick and Karen Brennan focused on computational thinking practices (iterative and incremental designing, testing and debugging, remixing and reusing, abstracting and modularizing).
Last month's webinar focused on computational thinking concepts (sequences, loops, parallelism, events, conditionals, operators, variables, and lists). Next month's webinar will conclude the series with a discussion on computational thinking perspectives.
Scratch supports the cultivation of computational thinking, a set of concepts, practices, and perspectives that draw on ideas from the world of computing. In the past few years, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of computational thinking for understanding and solving problems in a wide range of contexts, not only in the field of computer science. As young people program and share Scratch projects, they begin to develop as computational thinkers: they learn core computational and mathematical concepts, while also learning important strategies for designing, problem solving, and collaborating.
The presentation slides and example Scratch projects are attached below.
If you have any questions, please feel free to post them as a comment here.
Tune in to the next webinar for part 3 of the series on Monday, May 23 at 7pm EST: "Computational Thinking Perspectives."
As a member of an NGO in Brazil working with Scratch and the concepts of computational thinking, this kind of material is extremely valuable.
I hope you guys keep doing this amazing job of research and keep sharing this amazing materials about the fascinating educational field of computational thinking, so people anywhere around the world can learn from you.
I’m very glad that because of webinars like this, this kind of knowledge can reach Brazilian teachers who will find very useful this kind of directions to work with their students