CT Cafe

A call for CT.

Our goal as college professors is to open students minds to new experiences so they can grow intellectually while they mature through the traditional four-year process. But we are also challenged to give students the immediate skills they will need once they graduate so that they can begin their professional careers and move away from the fry-o-later to the cubicle and beyond.

Over the past decade, there has been a sea change in the marketplace demands for graduates. Whereas broad skills used to be sufficient, now our students must demonstrate a set of concrete skills that not long ago were required only of those in highly technical majors. Nowhere has this change created a greater shift than in fields such as marketing and public relations, which traditionally have been viewed as nontechnical but are now demanding a technological competency that is astounding.

The rest of the article can be found here.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/06/0627_fresh_entrepreneurs/7.htm

Study Less, Remember More

Procuit
Tom Meloche, Gus Mondalek, Eric Justusson, Rich Roberts, and William Cavnar

Companies regularly shell out big bucks for employees to attend professional training seminars. But research shows employees forget 80% of what they learn within a month of the event. Software developer and serial entrepreneur Tom Meloche, 46, a figure within the who has taught corporate seminars since the late 1980s, is trying to change that. Building on clinical research on human cognition, his Ann Arbor (Mich.) company makes software designed to increase knowledge retention by customizing lessons based on an individual user’s responses. Meloche says students who use the software need to study only three to five minutes three to four days a week in order to recall material over an extended period. His team is also writing algorithms meant to determine the most important information for students to learn in the first place.

So far, five-person Procuit, founded in 2007, has created a test app for Facebook (over 10,000 people have used it), landed one commercial customer for custom work, and launched a home-schooling application, HomeSchoolAdvantage.com (which charges $20 per user), in August. Meloche says Procuit recently received a $50,000 unsecured loan from a local incubator to develop and market the home-schooling product. He expects just under $100,000 in revenue in 2009 and around $500,000 in 2010.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) posted this press release announcing passage of House of Representatives Resolution 558 which designates the week of December 7, in honor of Grace Hopper's birthday, as `National Computer Science Education Week'.

The official title reads, "A resolution supporting the increased understanding of, and interest in, computer science and computing careers among the public and in schools, and to ensure an ample and diverse future technology workforce through the designation of National Computer Science Education Week."

We've been seeking to identify potential examples of CT inspiring so that we can market and "pull" demand for CT subject matter.

First, we should note that CT skills have not yet been identified, and thus, any examples would have to be analogous at this stage. The point in those examples being that this is the type of potential CT holds.
Second, what may be inspirational to one segment, may not inspire all, so we should continue to seek out appropriate examples for the corresponding groups - k-12, college, employers.

That said, here is one that may fit the bill. "But then he started to think about what he'd learned as a tutor. That if he broke things down for students into small increments, if they had a chance to practice and learn, they could inevitably continue. He realized that the same thing was true for him, too. This was John's first "a-ha!" moment. A powerful enough realization that he went on to earn his PhD."

"How powerful is that? Eager to get his revolutionary approach to teaching math into the hands of teachers, John created a not-for-profit organization called JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies). Today, JUMP is getting spectacular results with all kinds of kids. For instance, after working with JUMP, an entire class of Grade 3 students, including so-called slow learners, scored over 90% on a Grade 6 math test. A group of British children who had been written off as too unruly responded so enthusiastically and had such impressive results that the school board adopted the program. I could go on and on."

This example could serve as one in the area of decomposition - taking complex problems and breaking them down for further understanding, practice, and study.

So what's so CT about that? Well, nothing really. Other than how commonly this technique is used in CS to solve complex problems - code modularization, and once modularized those modules need to interact, calls to libraries, iterations between modules, etc.

• Abstraction
• Algorithm
• Data
• Decomposition
• Iterations
• Query
• Sense & Feedback
  
• Systems

Often times it's more about making things simpler to understand, study, explain, practice, and use, as a means to working on complex problems. While it's one of the more basic concepts, it's often overlooked in problem solving.

Here’s a little story about Bob and his diner, “Bob’s Eats”. Bob sells a wide variety of delicious deep fried dishes, from fried russet potatoes, to fried red potatoes. But, Bob is being outsold by his local rival, “Bett’s Diner”, and why? Because Bett understands Computational Thinking and Bob doesn’t!

1) Seeking a powerful characterization of CT
a. Using "Abstraction" as an analogy
b. Balancing Simplicity with Significance
c. Leveraging the power of ubiquitous computing

Comments encouraged!

Dan

I also was sent a recent NYT opinion article with some interesting comments about our also-ran status as a nation in the world intellectual and financial economy. Let me know what you think!

In Friday's meeting, Bernard asked me to pose this question to the team. You will recall that the steering committee is planning on identifying and interviewing subject matter expert(s) on computational thinking, the concept. So here's my question:

• CT clearly requires an interdisciplinary approach to reshaping educational programs to establish and reinforce CT foundational knowledge and skills. Can you imagine ways in which this would be done in a non-computer science domain without directly introducing the vocabulary of computer science or CT? That is, would you consider fifth graders' (or college business students' for that matter) demonstration of the ability to deconstruct a problem or to design a parallel problem solution strategy sufficient evidence of direct impact on educational results?
• Add your contributions as comments to this post...
  

Housekeeping Note