Computational Thinking

Computational Thinking Jon Udell UCEA April 2009

What is computational thinking? A set of principles, practices, and patterns that govern the structure, flow, and processing of information in networks.

Who learns these principles today? Mathematicians computer scientists geeks Who should learn them? Everybody WHY?

Our fate as a society depends on our collective ability to create, organize, navigate, search, interconnect, and reason in (and about) networks of people and information

What are some principles of computational thinking? Indirection Abstraction Namespace management Publish/subscribe syndication Query Composition/decomposition Generalization/specialization Structured data Automation

How would Piaget explain this?

And how would Piaget explain this? The structured Information must be here, right? Actually, no, it isn’t anywhere.

Andy Baio’s analysis of Feed the Animals

Track data on Wikipedia

Amazon Mechanical Turk bulk requester

What principles did Andy apply? Structured data Decomposition Composition Automation Generalization

oreilly.com search: before

oreilly.com search: after

What principle did Allen Noren apply? Namespace management Every book has a unique keyword, or tag Mine was pracintgr for Practical Internet Groupware The tag is used consistently in URLs for: Tables of contents Cover images Summaries Indexes Author bios

What principles did I apply on Allen’s behalf? Abstraction Structured data Automation

Transparency Camp 2009

Principles in use at Transparency Camp Publish/subscribe syndication Namespace management Indirection Query

Public events: the conventional way

Public events: the computational way

Principle: structured data How we describe calendar events: quot;Communications Committee, Tuesday at 5:30, Cheshire Career Center Conference Room, KHSquot; How computers understand calendar events: DTSTART:20080617T173000 SUMMARY:Communications Committee LOCATION:KHS , Cheshire Career Center Conference Room

Anti-principle: Artificial intelligence We infer context easily. Software tries hard, often fails.

Principles: indirection, pub/sub Keene Sentinel: Monday night chess club, 6:30 PM, Best Western Hotel (wrong) Eventful.com: Monday night chess club, 6:30 PM, E.F. Lane Hotel (right) When we are authoritative producers of feeds, and when the newspaper consumes them, the Information we provide will be timely and correct.

“We posted weekly.pdf to the website. Isn’t that good enough?”

Principles: abstraction, generalization Bloggers publish and subscribe to feeds So do Twitterers Abstraction: Publish/subscribe is a key pattern. Generalization: iCalendar files are feeds, can form pub/sub networks.

Calendar curation for Huntington, WV

Metadata for Huntington, WV One of these things Is not like the other.

Project-wide metadata

Project communication / collaboration The room orchestrates feeds In the same way that the project Itself does.

Principles at work in the elmcity project Indirection Abstraction Namespace management Publish/subscribe syndication Query Composition/decomposition Generalization/specialization Structured data Automation

How do we learn and apply these principles? How do we teach them? Let’s discuss.

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Computational Thinking

by judell on Mar 31, 2009

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