Computational thinking abstracts too far from the computer: We should teach CS with inquiry

Judy Robertson has a blog post that I really enjoyed: What Children Want to Know About Computers. She argues that computational thinking has abstracted too far away from what students really want to know about, the machine.

Computational thinking has been a hugely successful idea and is now taught at school in many countries across the world. Although I welcome the positioning of computer science as a respectable, influential intellectual discipline, in my view computational thinking has abstracted us too far away from the heart of computation – the machine. The world would be a tedious place if we had to do all our computational thinking ourselves; that’s why we invented computers in the first place. Yet, the new school curricula across the world have lost focus on hardware and how code executes on it.

Her post includes pictures drawn by children about what they think is going on inside of the computer.  They’re interested in these things!  We should teach them about it.  One of the strongest findings in modern science education is that inquiry works. Students learn science well if it’s based in the things that they want to know. Judy argues that kids want to know about the computer and how code executes on the computer. We shouldn’t be abstracting away from that. We should be teaching what the kids most want to learn.

To be clear, I am not criticizing the children, who were curious, interested and made perfectly reasonable inferences based on the facts they picked up in their everyday lives. But I think that computer science educators can do better here. Our discipline is built upon the remarkable fact that we can write instructions in a representation which makes sense to humans and then automatically translate them into an equivalent representation which can be followed by a machine dumbly switching electrical pulses on and off. Children are not going to be able to figure that out for themselves by dissecting old computers or by making the Scratch cat dance. We need to get better at explicitly explaining this in interesting ways.