This CPATH Community Building project creates a framework for incorporating computational thinking principles and learning environments across the Liberal Studies curriculum at DePaul University. It includes outreach to other institutions in the greater Chicago region to build a computational thinking community. The project includes activities to investigate and formalize the use of computational thinking, to evaluate the learning of computational thinking, to disseminate results and resources, and to build an external computational thinking community.
The intellectual merit of the project lies in the importance and currency of the topic and clear need for such changes in computing education to prepare the upcoming generation of computing professionals. The strong interdisciplinary project team has significant experience in educational innovation. The project has the potential to produce a much needed computational thinking framework that can be used for transforming general education content and courses across the nation.
The broader impacts of the project lie in the potential to prepare a diverse student population for computational intense courses and curricula where they learn computational thinking methodologies that transfer directly to their professional lives. The project includes dissemination to a broad community and opportunities for sharing of resources. There is potential for national models that can help to develop a computing-savvy workforce which is vital to the nation's continued prosperity and security.
The development of computer technologies and computer science has largely been motivated by a desire to support, extend, and amplify the human intellect. In order to make effective use of computer applications and techniques in his/her field, a person needs to have certain skills. One of the most important of these is the intellectual and reasoning skills needed to apply computational techniques or computer applications to problems and projects in a given field, whether the field is in the arts, sciences, humanities, or social sciences. This skill was given the name computational thinking by Jeannette Wing in a 2006 article. Wing envisioned computational thinking as an emerging basic skill that would become an integral part of education. In this project we developed a framework for implementing Wing’s vision in the context of undergraduate education. Our framework describes how to incorporate computational thinking across the curriculum and was developed with the participation of faculty from diverse fields. Using Peter Denning’s Great Principles of Computing to classify instances of computational thinking across various disciplines, the framework includes materials from 19 courses in the general education program at DePaul University and was created through the participation of 18 faculty from the College of Computing and Digital Media and the College of Liberal Arts and Science. The faculty participating in the project include computer scientists, writers, historians, artists, and physical and social scientists. The framework was assessed by faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, Loyola University Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Illinois Institute of Technology, and a workshop in June 2010 brought together participants from the project to reflect on the work and to plan for future initiatives. A number of the modified courses were also assessed to understand how well the modifications assisted students in learning both computational thinking skills and the discipline-specific material inherent in the class. As described above the project focused in its first two years on post-secondary education. Unfortunately, a minority of people in the United States attends and graduates from colleges and universities. Recognizing this and wanting to improve the potential of the project to enhance education in the United States, it was extended in its third year into the K-12 curriculum. Six teachers from the University of Chicago Lab Schools were recruited to extend the work begun in the undergraduate framework. Initially two computer science teachers, one at the high-school level and one at the middle-school level, and a high school Latin teacher developed and implemented a computational-thinking-enhanced curriculum. Later their work served as inspiration for high school English, history, and fine arts teachers who are in the process of developing computational thinking activities and assessments for their classrooms. The project web site contains the framework developed, recordings from workshop presentations, information about project participants, and a listing of project publications and presentations: http://compthink.cs.depaul.edu/
