UCx: Teaching Computational Thinking

• Binary basics
• Text and image representation
• Error control – how digital devices detect and correct errors in data
• Human Computer Interaction – how to evaluate and create interfaces that work for people
• Human capabilities

The aim of this course is to equip you so that you can support your learners in developing student agency while using their creativity and knowledge of computational thinking to potentially influence the future of society.

To achieve the goal of this course of learning the foundational skills, the program learning outcomes are:

• Know how to engage students with a range of deep ideas from Computational Thinking.

• Explain how a Parallel Sorting Network can be used to engage students with deep ideas in Computational Thinking.

• Explain how numbers, letters and images can be represented using just two symbols i.e. binary representation

• Know how to engage students with examples of error detection and correction to enable them to recognise how data is stored and shared safely in everyday life

• Explain why interface evaluation is an important skill in Computational Thinking, and be able to support learners to assess interfaces from the user’s point of view.

• Will you teach “coding”? We will show how coding (programming) relates to the activities we’re teaching, but this course will cover aspects of computational thinking that support teaching coding
• I’m no good at computing – is this for me? Yes! Many of the activities involved don’t use computers, and provide an approachable way to introduce computational thinking in your classroom.