2. Computational Thinking and Representations Clayton Lewis June 25, 2010

3. What is “computational thinking”? It’s way of thinking about problems that has evolved as computational methods have spread through activities of all kinds It’s helpful to understand why computation has become so useful!

4. A Slogan: “Computational systems are representational systems” People use computers to represent all kinds of important stuff… … because computational representations have extremely valuable characteristics. But, what is a representation?

5. A Representational System Relates a target domain of interest to a representation domain, in which work is easier to do in some way. Let’s look at a couple of examples

10. Advantages of Computational Representations automation replaces costly manual or mental operations with electronic operations computational representations can be stored and transmitted easily and cheaply computational representations of behavior have flexibility advantages… –many kinds of behavior can be captured

11. Computational Thinking… …is seeing how to create a computational representation of something you are interested in key aspects are –identifying the important things in the situation –identifying their behaviors

12. Computational Thinking Patterns… …are common kinds of behavior that are useful in many different situations you’ll learn some of these patterns, how to recognize when they are useful, and how to make them work in the AgentSheets visual programming system.

13. They are part of a bigger picture: features of a situation you are interested in connect to computational things – data, programs

14. Some more examples social networking tracking 16th C European diplomats (Thea Lindquist) ant foraging ….