I wish I had heard of computational thinking when I was training to be a teacher. The heartache of deconstructing a poem with Year 11 or constructing an essay with Year 12 might well have been avoided if only I (and they) had been taught to think like a computer. Sadly, I spent eight years toiling over various methods of SMILING at a poem and reading essays which began, “In this essay, I am going to…” NO! NO! NO!
Switching to primary opened my eyes to computing and coding. There, in various coding languages, was the answer I’d been looking for. That’s not to say computational thinking is only good for essay writing – although it did make me feel better about the various essay planning lessons I had put together using cut out shapes and sugar paper. Computational thinking has given me a base point from which to help my students begin to understand almost anything.
This article originally appeared in the July 2017 edition of UKEdChat Magazine
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@MrG_English Teacher – London
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