Re:Computer Science for the Rest of Us (Non-Computer Scientist)
by mjn on Saturday March 31, 2012 @10:51PM
(#3782471)
I agree, though empirically so far, "computational thinking" has been the most successful of the various phrases coined for versions of this concept.
I personally prefer "procedural literacy". "Procedural" still has some potentially scary connotations, but is as least not specifically about computation. The idea is that the general skill of thinking in terms of sequences and processes and systems is a kind of literacy to be fluent with, and that that's not really the same as knowing how to program in particular. But somehow "computational thinking" has garnered more press and institutional support, despite being coined several years later.
This paper has a nice history of procedural-literacy-esque proposals (disclaimer: written by my grad-school advisor): http://dm.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/MateasOTH2005....
What I find lacking in many non-tech folks is not Com Sci thought (by my definition), but rather something much more fundamental: systematic and analytic thought.
I find no end to the level of frustration I feel when I try to have a conversation about something, anything, with a non-tech person and they can't deal with breaking a problem down into a set of interrelated sub issues and focusing the discussion on what those issues are and how they interact with each other.
This of course, isn't true of every non-tech person I talk to. But, it is clearly far more prevalent outside the tech community. I do agree that it needs to be core to education, far more core than remembering what year some guy found some land in my opinion.