Computational Thinking : A 21 st Century Skill

Computational thinking is a 21st century skill that is becoming ever-more important in today’s increasingly technological world. It should appear formally in the K-12 curriculum, but the inherent vagueness of computational thinking necessitates a long journey to the classroom: contents must be developed under a new pedagogical means and be tested before gradually being incorporated into the curriculum. Training of teachers to adopt the new pedagogical means is also a prerequisite to incorporation. Thus, a faster route to help students could be considering computational thinking as an extracurricular activity, gradually developing and elaborating it, and finally imposing it in the curriculum once a solid framework has been achieved. In this paper, we introduce the pillars of computational thinking and present practical suggestions, namely computational mathematics and artificial intelligence labs, as platforms for developing computational thinking in K-12. The outlined approach is conceptual and high level – it should not be considered an action plan for the education system, but rather an ideological proposal in need of more elaboration for execution.