Computational Thinking

As COVID-19 is spreading around the world, the question is, when will our city/province/country have its peak. We all follow the news and updates continuously. To limit travel and possible exposure we hereby as a precaution suspend the stardust sessions, the summer classes and the regular classes till further notice. We do our best to be as informed as possible on the corona virus outbreak. In the meantime we use our time to improve our courses and create new ones.

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Sarah Blaauw

Kicaco.com

Besides having fun during the "Kids can Code" Summer Workshop and creating Animations, Interactive stories and Games, pupils will learn about the principals of Computational Thinking.

COMPUTATIONAL THINKING

The definition of computational thinking involves three key dimensions: (1) knowing certain computational concepts, (2) being able to employ those concepts using computational practices, and (3) developing new computational perspectives, an awareness of self, others, and world.

COMPUTATIONAL CONCEPTS

As young people design interactive media with Scratch, they engage with a set of computational concepts that are common in many programming languages. We can identify concepts, which are highly useful in a wide range of Scratch projects, and which transfer to other programming (and non-programming) contexts:

Concept	Description
sequence	identifying a series of ordered steps for a task
loops	running the same sequence multiple times
parallelism	making things happen at the same time
events	one thing causing another thing to happen
conditionals	making decisions based on conditions
operators	support for mathematical and logical expressions
data storing	storing, retrieving and modification of data
synchronization	passage and receipt of messages between application scripts
design	development of user-friendly and intuitive layouts

COMPUTATIONAL PRACTICES

The processes of construction and the design practices kids engage in while creating their projects. Four main sets of practices:

Practice	Description
experimenting and iterating	developing a little bit, then trying it out, then developing more
testing and debugging	making sure things work – the identiﬁcation, location, and elimination of programming errors, or bugs
reusing and remixing	making something by building on existing projects or ideas
abstracting and modularizing	exploring connections between the whole and the parts

COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

What perspective do we give young designer? How do they look at themselves when the master the computational concepts and computational pratices?

Perspective	Description
expressing	They realize that mastering the computational concepts and practices gives them the ability of creation “I can create.”
connecting	They recognizing the power of creating with and for others “I can do different things when I have access to others.”
questioning	feeling empowered to ask questions about the world “I can (use computation to) ask questions to make sense of (computational things in) the world.”