Carrie’s presentation on Computational thinking broke down what computational thinking is, and then walked us through a number of activities and how they demonstrated aspects of computational thinking.

What resonated the most with me was the idea of the importance of computational thinking, and how it can apply to offline coding. Actually typing in lines of code has become obsolete. There are a number of programs that you simply click and drag lines of code into place, shifting them around to perform different functions. I have observed this in a Grade 8 Careers class. In about 30 minutes, the entire class, including myself, coded the game “Pong” from scratch. I remember my mom telling me she took an entire 13 week university course on how to code Pong.

While the act of actually typing in lines of code may no longer be a practical skill, understanding the rules and logic of coding is not. To run these programs, the skills that can be taught through computational thinking exercises, like offline coding, can be of great benefit to students.

The idea of teaching computational thinking through offline coding activities is very much in line with a competency based model.

This workshop presented ideas of how to imbed 21^st century ideas, and pedagogy, into Math classrooms, as well as across the curriculum.