I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Conrad Wolfram speak on a couple of occasions, and I love his drive for the curriculum to be about solving real world problems (now that code on our laptops and tablets can equally well handle the stripped down question of a wobbling children’s toy or plotting a rocket’s path to the moon as it interacts with all the other planets and star in a solar system). I have been frustrated by his interpretation of coding as a capstone activity, “If you understand something then you can code it.”, and prefer to emphasize the discovery that is possible through coding and experimenting with 1000s of cases rather than dozens on a calculator (or a handful in my head).

Wolfram has responsed to changes in the curriculum, and it is a good read. I am struck by his definition as computational thinking as a cycle of “Define, Translate, Compute, Interpret” as being essentially the behaviour of a skilled mathematician!

It is also worth looking at the comments in response to this article, where the case is made that CT “… is more than problem solving (and perspective which you touch on). It includes a way of understanding that is different from what came before. It involves seeing the world in terms of communicating interacting processes. It provides a different way of understanding phenomena as diverse as natural selection, markets, ecosystems, intelligence, and maybe also consciousness.”.

Perhaps I have been too quick to adapt CT to my view of how a trained mathemo behaves! I recommend Papert’s paper on powerful ideas to address this imbalance in schools.