Editorial: Educational Computing and Computer Science
Betül C. Czerkawski, Eugene W. Lyman · 2015
The resurgence of interest in teaching computational thinking (CT) to K-12 students iis an opportunity to provide students with a critical foundational skill. This will only be possible, however, if CT is understood to be separable from the more specific field of Computer Science. Jeanette Wing's influential 2006 article on computational thinking (CT) asserted that CT should be taught in K-12 schools as a foundational skill along the lines of reading, writing and arithmetic. This assertion fired a renewed interest in study, teaching and research about computational thinking in general and, more specifically, about teaching computer programming in schools. This is a kind of resurgence of the work done by Seymour Papert (1980), who first drew attention to the importance of educational computation, especially for younger students. Now that computers are a ubiquitous part of daily life and the future looks as if it will become even more digitized, an understanding of computation—what it is and how it works—begins to seem more and more like a general skill for daily life. This basic need, however, does not appear to be defining the direction of CT teaching in K-12 education. Schools across the United States are starting to experiment with teaching CT. Organizations such as CSTA (The Computer Science Teachers Association), ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) and SRI International are supporting and promoting more systematic and organized research and implementation efforts. We have noticed, however, a tendency to regard teaching CT as starting and ending with teaching programming in schools. This in turn appears to be linked to the expectation that an increasing number of children will develop an interest in computer science and STEM fields. While CT and computer science are linked, computational thinking is not simply computer science; teaching CT should not be reduced merely to teaching Scratch or Alice. The fact that many proponents of CT are computer scientists themselves unfortunately reinforces the assumption that CT must, inevitably, point to computer science as a sole destination.