From computational thinking to constructive design with simple models

Abstract

Computational Thinking has advocated for a decade the importance of a kind of education that elicits and fosters the understanding of computational concepts that are deemed “natural”, thus widely learnable and adoptable, but not supported or at least not explicitly featured nor named in traditional education. In this paper we argue that the most important aspect of this educational revolution is actually the “doing” part, in terms of creating a habit of designing the logic of any project or endeavour in terms of simple models. Simple models, especially if formally underpinned, analyzable, executable, and amenable to code generation for the orchestration of services, are the missing link between computational thoughts and the programming level. Our approach is based on years of experience with middle and high school students, beginner students in Computer Science aged from 17 to over 50, and with students of other disciplines. They have been introduced successfully to CS or programming via constructing simple, yet executable models in the form of short courses, bootcamps, and semester-long courses in various locations and settings. We are convinced that, unlike the widespread push towards coding, this approach is scalable. We also advocate its adequacy to provide the general public of professionals with the kind of familiarity with computational concepts and the level of confidence in practical making of applications and designs that can be a game changer for the societal diffusion of basic computing-related comprehension and design skills.