An ISTE Computational Thinking Session Reflection

Just last week, my extraordinary colleague, Meredith Ward Hill and I were sharing a session on Computational Thinking at ISTE Live - ASCD Annual Conference in San Antonio.  The session, “Solving the 🧩Puzzle:  Putting the Pieces Together via Computational Thinking” was created originally to help North Carolina educators who teach in the K-5 setting to connect their curriculum to Computational Thinking.  


Computational Thinking involves the use of “special thinking patterns and processes to post and solve problems” (Jane Krauss and Kiki Prottsman “Computational Thinking {and Coding} for Every Student).   This session was developed to support a strong foundation in Computational Thinking for elementary educators to enable a successful entry for students as they complete the Computer Science requirement for graduation in North Carolina.  {I cannot stress the importance of this book by Jane Krauss and Kiki Prottsman as it has a lot of relevant information.  While some of their examples are older since the book was written several years ago, it provides a solid foundation on Computational Thinking and its elements}.

In creating this session, we sought to help educators connect the four pillars of Computational Thinking to the curriculum and learning activities that are used in the classroom.  Those pillars with a brief description are below:

Pattern Recognition - analyzing and reviewing data to determine a connection or similarity between these data.  This is much like putting the pieces of a puzzle together where you look for the shapes needed as well as the matching images.  

Abstraction - ignoring certain pieces of information in order to move closer to a solution; think about how often we help students learn to ignore certain pieces of a text in order to answer a question or complete an activity.  This helps to ensure that students are not “hung up” on unnecessary details and can focus on the task.

Decomposition - this involves breaking a challenge into simpler tasks.  In the classroom, we often ask students to make a large task, such as multiplying three digit numbers, into smaller pieces so the smaller piece is more manageable.  

Algorithm - a set of directions to be followed much like a recipe.  We often see this reflected in math processes that are taught.  It can also involve helping students learn how to construct sentences in a foreign language class where they have to conjugate verbs with the appropriate subjects.

I also like the emphasis that is placed on problem posing and solution with Computational Thinking.  Too often, I worry that many educators shy away from Computational Thinking due to their lack of experience with it or perception of it as being something that only coders do.  At the heart of Computational Thinking is problem solving where specific processes are applied.  Yet, we need to broaden our lens to include helping students learn to identify problems.  By finding problems to solve, our students see a real world connection to what they are learning and see meaning in what they are learning in school.  If we can connect the skills and information that students learn in school to the world in which they live, then we can engage them in meaningful work that has value and authenticity.  

In this session, we wanted participants to understand and live the four pillars as they sought to solve problems.  We introduced the related vocabulary and gave them a chance to practice and assess themselves.  However, this was simply not enough though - we wanted them to experience the four pillars in a way that was impactful so we worked on several problems for them to solve including an activity where they are tasked with adding up the numbers between 1 and 200 in 30 seconds with no devices permitted.  This activity was taken from Code.org.  We then moved into using the second part of this activity where the participants worked on determining the directions for a game with no directions.  During each of these activities, we asked participants to identify and explain which of the four pillars of Computational Thinking that they used.  This helped to reinforce the four pillars in an experiential way that connected their definition to their application.  

A new highlight to this session involved the application of Computational Thinking to AI.  We shared an activity from MIT Media Lab from “An Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Curriculum for Middle School Students“ by Blakeley H. Payne supervised by Cynthia Breazeal, published August 2019 from the MIT Media Lab, licensed under Creative Commons.  

In this activity, the Teachable Machine website is used to classify images of cats and dogs.  This activity helped to connect the importance of Computational Thinking to a real life application.  As we experienced in the demonstration during our session, the size of the data set used to train the AI is important.  Also, we saw that AI really wants to please its user, in fact so much that it even tried to classify me as a cat or a dog (as a side note, it felt that I was about 65% dog).  This activity has many interesting applications that can be used with students to better understand AI and Computational Thinking including the importance of having a variety of different sets and biases.  One of the images of a pomeranian was incorrectly identified as a cat.  This allowed us to have a more lengthy discussion about what data points that AI may be using to classify images. Additionally, this could lead to a more lengthy discussion about the importance of AI classifying images or real people correctly.  Imagine being in a self-driving car and failing to realize that a pedestrian is crossing the street.  

We were so incredibly fortunate to have an amazing group of participants from all over the world including Brazil, Guam, Hawaii, and the United States.  This session was extremely memorable to me as the group was very participatory and collaborated.  We all learned so much together.  Here is some feedback that we received from the attendees:

“I enjoyed the unplugged activities that drove home the pillars of Computational Thinking. The activities stretched my understanding of AI bias in outputs.”

“The connection that I made with computational thinking and my current teaching practices was powerful. Thank you for sharing so many resources and activities that I can use in my classroom.”

As we move forward, we must continue to help classroom educators learn more the four pillars of Computational Thinking and connect these pillars with the learning activities occurring in their classrooms.  ISTE has created Computational Thinking Competencies to guide educators as well.  Be sure to check out Code.org for incredible activities that are both plugged and unplugged.  Our ISTE presentation and related resources also contain additional opportunities for educators to learn more about how to connect Computational Thinking to their classroom.