What is Computational Thinking and Why is it Important?

Over the last decade, the question of how and why to integrate computers into classrooms has become increasingly relevant. From typing with Mavis Beacon to navigating 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail, computer-based education in schools is nothing new. But these days, with increasing demand for STEM career-ready graduates, computer science courses have become more important, even becoming a nationwide high school graduation requirement. 

But computer science alone might not be enough to prepare students for a technology-driven economy. What if computers and computer programming languages evolve so fast that today’s graduates are behind in ten years? And why wait until high school to integrate computer science classes?

These questions are at the heart of computational thinking, a priority area of The Robin Hood Foundation’s Learning + Technology Fund, supported by Endless. At its core, computational thinking is about teaching students how to think, problem solve, and create with computers in order to learn any subject better. Integrated into general classroom learning, it has the “potential to develop students’ higher-order thinking, collaboration, and communication skills in ways that can advance learning across the curriculum and empower students to be creative inventors with technology” (Robin Hood, 2018).

Why the focus on computational thinking and not computer science? According to Jeannette Wing, the Director of the Data Science Institute at Columbia University, and a seminal scholar on the topic, computational thinking is about more than learning to code: “Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires thinking at multiple levels of abstraction.”

Robin Hood is focusing on elementary grades in particular because starting this kind of learning at a young age helps students build strong foundations. Another benefit: computational thinking can be integrated across subjects and curricula, inspiring engagement with core knowledge in new ways. This ensures all students, not solely those with access to enrichment opportunities, have equitable access. Plus, the skills developed through computational thinking integration contribute to positive attitudes towards the computer sciences, which is key in keeping students, especially girls and students of color, open to ongoing experimentation with computers.

So what does this actually look like in the classroom? That’s one of the things the Learning + Technology Fund is trying to figure out. 

Impactful integration of computational thinking in the classroom involves experiences that effectively advance both computing and content knowledge through their interaction; the use of a computer enhances content learning. For example: A social studies teacher asks her students to first classify different historical figures based on their position on a given issue, and then use a program to create a diagram showing trends, concentrations and overlaps in the data to make sense of historical events.

But “no one really knows what integrating computational thinking throughout the K–5 curriculum ‘should’ look like, or how teachers would implement it.” Currently, most computer science training for teachers focuses on one product, test, or language. One of the main goals of The Fund is to address these challenges by preparing elementary teachers to integrate and teach computational thinking broadly, with the grounding to identify when, where and how they can bring computing tools into the classroom. By investing in systems that support both pre-service and in-service teachers, The Fund aims to build a supported network of computational thinking-ready elementary teachers and schools and develop scalable training models backed by data and research.

This year, with the Fund’s investment in improving teacher efficacy and building computational thinking communities across New York and beyond, we expect computational thinking will and can’t wait to see the creativity that brings these ideas to life.