Computational Thinking William C. Ridgeway 4/17/2011 CSCE 390 Professional Issues in Computer Science and Engineering

Subject Matter It is believed that by adding Computational Thinking needs to be added to all current educational programs. Its is believed that this will improve or promote skills like planning, learning, scheduling, searching, and making trade-offs. It is also believed that this will inspire more students to participate in the major of computer science.

Ethics I believe that the case here is that the idea is to try to force a style of thinking upon future students instead of allowing for the development of a natural way of thinking that fits the student. In this case the stakeholders are the people promoting this belief, the students, and the teachers who will have to teach it. When it comes to the people promoting this way of thinking it will inspire a believed proper way of thinking that will benefit students. Now when it comes to the students it could both hurt and benefit the students, some will be able to adapt to that way of thinking but some might not and will end up struggling while trying to keep up with the others who might excel. Then the teachers come into effect the teachers have to be able to teach the students or at least instill the thought process into them so that they will be able understand and be able to use it for there needs within their education.

Ethics continued To make sure this works they need to be able to test this and make sure that the overall outcome is what they proposed. I recommend a control group to see if this works and then have a conceptual test at the end where you test the students who where taught the computational way of thinking and another group of students who where taught a normal way. The best case for this project would be that the test shows that the computational students scored higher than the other students and should they not they know that this perhaps is not the way to present this way of thinking. A possible solution of all of this would be to slowly integrate a sort of learning process which instills the ideas behind the Computational thinking so that it develops into the norm over time.

People With this we need to make sure that all people are treated equally and given the same amount of time and help to see if the process is a success or not. The overall idea of this test is to see if this is going to be success or not so in this case we will be using people a means to a end but in the end it will hopefully prove useful to all future students. This solution is by far not a perfect solution so that is where the testing comes in. If the test proves successful in showing that Computational thinking will help all students in improving there overall thought process then it should be accepted by all. In my opinion the testing between the groups is the only way to show possible benefits from the Computational way of thinking. When it comes down to it there is no philosophy needed for this decision. Only a basic logical process. If the test shows a improvement then there is obviously some ground behind the claims of it.

Code of Ethics The ACM code helped to influence my decision making for this assignment because of mainly the first few sections within the code. 1.1 Contribute to society and human well-being. I believe that through test we can show that by implementing Computational thinking into current education we can help to make a more efficient way of society per say. 1.2 Avoid harm to others. In this we are trying to show that this new way of thinking will not hurt anyone but will but help every student and everyone associated with trying to implement this new learning process not only within school but within there lives.

Closing Statements In closing the implementation of this current learning process could very well help usher in a new and more productive way of thinking but it has to be slowly introduced so that we can avoid having any problems for anyone having to adjust to a completely new way of thinking for some. We also have to prove that this will be beneficial in the end and it will help.

Refrence Computational thinking ‘vital for child’s analytical ability’ Web Address: times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no= &version=1&template_id=36&parent_id=16