As the beginning module of all the courses, Computational thinking is a guide for the students. It tells students how to get into the computing world when they need to learn about this field. Also, it provides opportunities to practise the exercise of thinking logic about computing. Everyone can be affected by computational thinking (Wing 2008).
Moreover, it can be applied to multiple subjects (Bundy 2007). Therefore, similar to computational thinking can be described as a guide for students. It also can be likened to the primary subject in education, which plays an essential role in helping students develop in higher-level courses and subjects and future education and the future career (Lu and Fletcher 2009).
For the study, this course help students to adapt to using computational thinking to consider and solve problems, whether from the consequences aspect or the whole process aspect. The methods and ideas of thinking trained in the course can be used in future learning in computer science or computing. Computational thinking could also help students realize the issues from abstraction to more and more concrete (Wing 2008). Besides, students need to know why and how to deal with computing problems, especially challenging problems, complicated problems, core problems, and some problems students solve once, and will be benefited from it in the future.
Similar to the content above, Computational Thinking can help students formulate the problems they meet during learning (Wing 2011). Through learning, students can classify different issues and get their way of analysing the problem in order to recognize and solve the questions more effectively. In other words, Computational Thinking can help students build their framework to think about the problem and create their own unique body knowledge (Brennan and Resnick 2012).
Reference
Brennan, K. and Resnick, M. 2012. New frameworks for studying and assessing the development of computational thinking. In Proceedings of the 2012 annual meeting of the American educational research association, Vancouver, Canada (Vol. 1, p. 25).
Bundy, A. 2007. Computational thinking is pervasive. Journal of Scientific and Practical Computing, 1(2), pp.67-69.
Lu, J.J. and Fletcher, G.H. 2009. Thinking about computational thinking. In Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (pp. 260-264).
Wing, J.M. 2008. Computational thinking and thinking about computing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 366(1881), pp.3717-3725.
Wing, J. 2011. Research notebook: Computational thinking—What and why. The link magazine, 6, pp.20-23.