Piaget and Computational Thinking
Sylvia da Rosa Zipitría · 2018
In this article I present a theoretical framework for the concept "computational thinking". I do so in response to some of the problems and consequences of the lack of viable theoretical foundations; especially in relation to the development in recent years of many educational practices that claim the term "computational thinking". I therefore introduce my extension of Jean Piaget's general law of cognition which arose as a result of my empirical research on novice learners knowledge of the concept of a program as an executable object. Said empirical study is briefly described in this paper as a means to highlight the key to my extension of Piaget's general law, which is the insight of how the thought processes and methods involved in cases where the subject must instruct an action to a computer differ from those in which the subject instructs another subject, or performs the action themselves. My theory explains the difference between algorithmic thinking and computational thinking by adequately locating it in the specificities of the subject instructing a computer. Hence, in this article I claim that my extension of Piaget's law offers a more empirically thorough and theoretically sound way forward in the conceptual development of "computational thinking" than the alternatives that are being debated in academia to the present day.