By Alka Verma, Resident Director, Zamit
We’re living in a world that is facing challenges in every sphere of existence. This includes climate change, learning crisis, natural disasters, and now the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier, with the sudden need for a lockdown, schools & other educational institutions were forced to shift to online classrooms without educators & students having any training, complete lack of resources, and knowledge.
Thanks to the availability of technology tools, schools didn’t come to a halt but continued to function smoothly. Hence, the human community understood the extra value that technology added to the education sector.
As our technologies have rapidly developed, making students learn how to program, question & manipulate digital devices the realization dawned that computational thinking is one of the essential future-ready skill sets for future leaders.
Computation thinking is a 21st-century skill that refers to the thought process & basic concepts used to understand the problem and of generating a solution which can be understood by both humans & computers. Going forward, it will be not enough to just learn the surface of the tools. We’ll have to use young students’ learning ability and creativity to develop key computational thinking skills.
CT is made up of 4 parts:
- Decomposition: Breaking down the complex problem in smaller, manageable parts
- Abstraction: Removing the irrelevant details & focusing on important information only
- Pattern Recognition: Looking for similarities within the problems
- Algorithm: Developing a step-by-step solution to the problem
CT is crucial for future-readiness
- Computational thinking has the potential to equip students with more than just “technology literacy”, or working knowledge of how to use computers for everyday tasks.
- It encourages students to create tools to solve problems, and not use existing tools and is a skill that needs to be developed in the next generation.
- It helps students define what can and can’t be solved and prompts them to research computational models for situations that are traditionally unrelated to computer science. The skills learned and developed through computational thinking will benefit them in whatever field they choose after school.
- Companies are looking for critical thinkers who will develop, iterate, and improve step by step. Confidence in dealing with complexity, ability to deal with open-ended problems, ability to communicate and work with a team to reach a common goal are few of the traits that companies are looking for along with your skillset. All these and many more essential skills are supported by computational thinking.
- CThinkers are innovators. They take a great idea and enhance it to a new product/purpose. This skill makes the students understand exactly what to extract from the problem to create a solution, they are forced to think differently and end up focusing on the most important element they’re working on.
- They make the jump from consumer to creators and with the help of algorithm design and other technology tools, they instruct the computer machine to do almost everything that a human can do in a much quicker, efficient, and accurate way.
- Children love to play and are relatively fast-learners. In order to make them future-ready which is so uncertain & quick, it is important to include CT right from their primary classes and use simple, fun & relatable methods to teach them CT. This will promote creative problem solving & logical thinking.
