Strategies for Developing Computational Thinking

Abstract

The term computational thinking came into wide use as a popular expression during the 1980s that refers to a collection of computational ideas that people in computing disciplines acquire through their work in designing programs, software and computations performed by the computer hardware (Tedre and Denning 2016). It was envisioned that computational thinking will be a fundamental skill that complements to reading, writing and arithmetic for everyone and represents a universally applicable aptitude. Denning (2017) paraphrased the definition as “Computational thinking is the thought processes involved in formulating problems so that their solutions are represented as computational steps and algorithms that can be effectively carried out by an information-processing agent”. Educators believed that assimilating computational thinking at a young age will assist them to enhance problem-solving skills, improve logical reasoning and advance analytical ability – key attributes to succeed in the twenty-first century (Riley and Hunt 2014).