This week, I was reading about how computational thinking (later referred to CT) is used in classrooms. Coming from a computer science background, I believe that if teachers pay more attention to deliberately include CT in their classes, it will transform our national teaching and learning.
The concepts of CT are usually simple when you read about them, even if you are not a computer person. However, when you come to use them yourself, it takes practice and a lot of thinking, let alone teaching them. That being said, I am not stating CT is hard to infuse in our schools, but rather it takes effort to constructively plan to utilize them to make our students independent thinkers.
I decided to interview a science teacher to think those ideas aloud. While CT has many concepts, I choose to talk about “Algorithmic Thinking” and “Decomposition”.
Algorithmic Thinking
When I spoke with the science educator about algorithmic thinking, she immediately understood what I was talking about. The word Algorithm is very well known in our heritage, because it goes back to ABU JA’FAR MOHAMMED IBN MUSA AL-KHOWARIZMI, the great scholar of mathematician and astrology. Most educators know the general idea and are familiar with its uses in computation. Hence it was a great start.
The teacher gave many examples of students using a set of pre-defined algorithms, especially when she has a science laboratory experiment. However, when I asked if there was any activity involving students to develop their own algorithms, the teacher gave vague answer. So I started giving her more examples of how active learning uses algorithmic thinking in different ways. This helped the teacher to recall an example of one of the class experiments where students were asked to separate mixtures. The students were provided with all different separators (like magnet, filtration sheet, heater for evaporation) and the task was to find how they will use these separation techniques and in which order.
I think allowing the students to explore on their own is great. I believe using these experiments to explicitly teach algorithms and allow students to develop a list of steps for one-another will give a practical sense of appreciating algorithms. For an example, the exercise originally had two different mixtures and each group of students had to separate both. Instead, it could be done so CT is explicitly in action, where the first mixture is distributed to half of the class, and the second to the other half. The separation tools can be shared with all the class. Then each group is responsible to write the steps for separating their own mixture. Lastly, each group can share their finding with a group using the other mixture. This way, more emphasis is give to algorithmic thinking as well as communicating it.
Decomposition
Explaining Decomposition to a science teacher is a bit tricky. Chemistry already have this as a concept for breaking down material to simpler form of matter. Therefore, I gave non-academic examples to be able to explain the concept in CT. One example was how starting a business in today’s market requires many things, so a founder of a business need to think about “solvable” problems in order to be able to put them in action. Such as: creating a website, a market brand, and creating the product (or service) he wants to sell. I also gave academic example from mathematics, how in word problems, a student need to find the known values, unknown values, what is needed, and which mathematical operation or formula must be used. Hence, the student can be more confident that he is left with a set of solvable sub-problems.
The teacher then suggested that measuring the density of non uniform object is an example of decomposition. Because finding the volume is one problem, the other is finding the weight. Applying the formula then become evident. I asked her, how does she teach that. She explained that only high achievers get to solve such question. no specific technique is used when teaching this concept. It seemed that decomposition is so far used in the educator classes in an implicit way. I suggested to consider explicit use of decomposition of science projects.
My reflection
It was interesting while we were discussing that some schools use other terms of some concepts CT. For example, each lesson plan should have “Critical Thinking Skills” which really involve problem solving skills. Sometimes they use pattern matching and abstraction but they do not separate each of these concepts. Logical thinking is something all schools put in perspective, but I believe there can be better ways compared to what the science was explaining their approach. Making sure that we teach students different approaches to solving problems will widen their perspective and will only give them more space to think.
There were some limitation in considering future changes. In our public schools, curriculum is usually set by the ministry of education, and they monitor lesson planning very closely. That leaves teachers limited when they want to innovate out of the box.
Hanan Alshikh 