
Wolfram on teaching kids “coding” vs. “computational thinking” - akfs
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/09/how-to-teach-computational-thinking/
======
akfs
"But when they do learn about “programming”, say in high school, what do they
actually learn? There’s usually a lot of syntactic detail, but the top
concepts tend to be conditionals, loops and variables. As someone who’s spent
most of his life thinking about computation, this is really disappointing.
Yes, these concepts are certainly part of low-level computer languages. But
they’re not central to what we now broadly understand as computation—and in
computational thinking in general they’re at best side shows."

Is our approach to teaching kids to code wrong? Do we put too much emphasis on
what Wolfram calls the top concepts (loops, variables, etc) and language
specific syntax - and not enough emphasis on how to think computationally?

~~~
jungletek
He's actually saying that the fact that conditionals, loops, and variables are
the 'top concepts', i.e. the most challenging they'll encounter in that
curriculum, is disappointing.

~~~
akfs
I'm curious what others think of his observation. Is he right? Are we
potentially turning off a lot of kids from engineering by focusing on these
"top concepts" versus more computation like thinking projects?

