KEYNOTE ADDRESS Friday, October 9, 2009 A NEW WAY OF THINKING ABOUT COMPUTATIONAL THINKING*

Owen Astrachan Director of Undergraduate Studies Professor of the Practice of Computer Science Duke University Durham, NC 27708
Computational Thinking has emerged as an enduring metaphor in teaching and thinking about Computer Science since Jeanette Wing brought the term to our attention in a 2006 CACM article. Computational thinking involves abstraction, but a definition that is too abstract does not help in explaining computational thinking to someone who doesn't already have an intuitive idea of what it is: "Computational thinking is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task or designing a large complex system. It is separation of concerns. It is choosing an appropriate representation for a problem or modeling the relevant aspects of a problem to make it tractable." Circular reasoning doesn't help much either in explaining computational thinking to a wide audience: "Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science" In this talk I'll discuss and provide examples of a different way of looking at and thinking about computational thinking. We've developed an approach that's not designed to make students competent in any specific technology nor is it intended to attract more students to major or minor in computer science. Instead, by using and analyzing events, phenomena, and stories relating computing, technology, policy, and law, we have developed a course based on 'Technical and Social Foundations of the Internet' that appeals to a wide student audience. Our goal is to show students a wide-range of what computational thinking means outside of the science disciplines. I'll discuss the examples, the course, our approach, and next steps. __________________________________________
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