Developing Students’ Computational Literacy

In this Educational Researcher article, Shuchi Grover and Roy Pea (Stanford University) stress the importance of students developing computational thinking and share the following “big ideas” of computing (most pertinent to the high-school level) developed by the College Board and National Science Foundation (http://www.csprinciples.org): 

• Computing is a creative human activity.
• Abstraction reduces information and detail to focus on concepts relevant to understanding and solving problems.
• Data and information facilitate the creation of knowledge.
• Algorithms are tools for developing and expressing solutions to computational problems.
• Programming is a creative process that produces computational artifacts.
• Digital devices, systems, and networks that interconnect them enable and foster computational approaches to solving problems.
• Computing enables innovation in other fields, including science, social science, humanities, arts, medicine, engineering, and business.

Grover and Pea point to several curriculum initiatives available online:

• Exploring CS, a 1-year college preparatory curriculum – http://www.exploringcs.org 

• CS4HS – http://www.cs4hs.com 

• Computing in the Core – http://www.computinginthecore.org 

• Exploring Computational Thinking – http://www.google.com/edu/computational-thinking 

“Computational Thinking in K-12: A Review of the State of the Field” by Shuchi Grover and Roy Pea in Educational Researcher, January/February 2013 (Vol. 42, #1, p. 38-43), 

http://edr.sagepub.com/content/42/1/38.abstract; the authors can be reached at 

shuchig@stanford.edu and roypea@stanford.edu. 

From the Marshall Memo #476