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Computational Thinking

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Encyclopedia of Education and Information Technologies

Introduction

At the turn of this century, educators and social scientists began to notice that youth who grew up having intensive, long-term experiences with technology – sometimes called “digital natives” or “power users of technology” – appeared to think and solve problems differently from those with more limited technology experience. At the same time, computer scientists began to discuss how individuals living, learning, and working in an increasingly technology-driven world would become “advantaged” if they adopted the “ways of thinking” used by computer scientists. They began to describe the ways of thinking that would allow people to take advantage of the affordances of technology for the creative process, for solving previously intractable problems, and for producing new products and services. These trends converge in the concept we now know as “computational thinking.”

Over the past decade, computational thinking has become a global initiative for educational change. Countries...

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Correspondence to Joyce Malyn-Smith .

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Malyn-Smith, J., Angeli, C. (2020). Computational Thinking. In: Tatnall, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Education and Information Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10576-1_4

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