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The Computer Science Way of Thinking in Human History and Consequences for the Design of Computer Science Curricula

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Informatics in Schools: Focus on Learning Programming (ISSEP 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10696))

Abstract

Teaching computer science offers more than algorithmic thinking (or more general and as recently presented: computational thinking). To understand this claim, one has to have a more careful look at the development of human culture, science, and technology. This helps not only to recognize that the computer science way of thinking was crucial for the development of human society since anyone can remember, but it helps to make a good choice of topics for sustainable computer science education in the context of science and humanities. This leads to the creation of textbooks that do not focus on particular knowledge for specialists, but offer serious contributions in the very general framework of education.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It was technically much easier to build processors executing operations using binary numbers than using decimal numbers. Also, it was much easier to build stable physical systems for storing information with two states only (interpreted as 0 and 1) than developing a computer memory based on many states.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Juraj Hromkovič & Regula Lacher

Authors
  1. Juraj Hromkovič
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  2. Regula Lacher
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Juraj Hromkovič .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Mathematics and Informatics, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Valentina Dagienė

  2. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Arto Hellas

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Hromkovič, J., Lacher, R. (2017). The Computer Science Way of Thinking in Human History and Consequences for the Design of Computer Science Curricula. In: Dagienė, V., Hellas, A. (eds) Informatics in Schools: Focus on Learning Programming. ISSEP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10696. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71483-7_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71483-7_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71482-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-71483-7

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