Developing computational thinking in the classroom: a framework

Computational thinking sits at the heart of the new statutory programme of study for Computing: “A high quality computing education equips pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world” (Department for Education, 2013, p. 188). This document aims to support teachers to teach computational thinking. It describes a framework that helps explain what computational thinking is, describes pedagogic approaches for teaching it and gives ways to assess it. Pupil progression with the previous ICT curriculum was often demonstrated through ‘how’ (for example, a software usage skill) or ‘what’ the pupil produced (for example, a poster). This was partly due to the needs of the business world for office skills. Such use of precious curriculum time however has several weaknesses. Firstly, the country’s economy depends on technological innovation not just on use of technology. Secondly, the pace of technology and organisational change is fast in that the ICT skills learnt are out of date before a pupil leaves school. Thirdly, technology invades all aspects of our life and the typically taught office practice is only a small part of technology use today

A domain-specific dialect for financial-economic calculations using reactive programming

This thesis investigates to what extent reactive programming is suited for the implementation of systems that support banks in providing financial-economic advice to their private customers. To this end, we built a small such system in Hotdrink, as a proof-of-concept. This small system is a simplification of a much larger system that has been developed by Delfi Data, and which is overdue to be rewritten from scratch. Our system was evaluated on the commercial criteria readability, maintainability, extensibility, and efficiency. It turned out that readability and maintainability were quite high, even allowing nondevelopers to understand most of the code. However, extensibility is limited for financial calculations in general and especially for parallelization and encapsulation. With regard to commercialization, the solution was too immature to be evaluated on efficiency. Our conclusion is that reactive programming alone is too restrictive for solving financialeconomic problems. Notwithstanding the above, as a by-product we developed a prototype which sourceto-source compiles our new high-level domain-specific JavaScript dialect to reactive calculations.Masteroppgave i informatikkINF39

GRAPHICAL CONFIGURATION PROGRAMMING - THE STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION, CONSTRUCTION AND EVOLUTION OF SOFTWARE SYSTEMS USING GRAPHICS

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A Data Transformation System for Biological Data Sources

Scientific data of importance to biologists in the Human Genome Project resides not only in conventional databases, but in structured files maintained in a number of different formats (e.g. ASN.1 and ACE) as well a.s sequence analysis packages (e.g. BLAST and FASTA). These formats and packages contain a number of data types not found in conventional databases, such as lists and variants, and may be deeply nested. We present in this paper techniques for querying and transforming such data, and illustrate their use in a prototype system developed in conjunction with the Human Genome Center for Chromosome 22. We also describe optimizations performed by the system, a crucial issue for bulk data

Muck: A Build Tool for Data Journalists

Veracity and reproducibility are vital qualities for any data journalism project. As computational investigations become more complex and time consuming, the effort required to maintain correctness of code and conclusions increases dramatically. This report presents Muck, a new tool for organizing and reliably reproducing data computations. Muck is a command line program that plays the role of the build system in traditional software development, except that instead of being used to compile code into executable applications, it runs data processing scripts to produce output documents (e.g., data visualizations or tables of statistical results). In essence, it automates the task of executing a series of computational steps to produce an updated product. The system supports a variety of languages, formats, and tools, and draws upon well-established Unix software conventions. A great deal of data journalism work can be characterized as a process of deriving data from original sources. Muck models such work as a graph of computational steps and uses this model to update results efficiently whenever the inputs or code change. This algorithmic approach relieves programmers from having to constantly worry about the dependency relationships between various parts of a project. At the same time, Muck encourages programmers to organize their code into modular scripts, which can make the code more readable for a collaborating group. The system relies on a naming convention to connect scripts to their outputs, and automatically infers the dependency graph from these implied relationships. Thus, unlike more traditional build systems, Muck requires no configuration files, which makes altering the structure of a project less onerous. Muck’s development was motivated by conversations with working data journalists and students. This report describes the rationale for building a new tool, its compelling features, and preliminary experience testing it with several demonstration projects. Muck has proven successful for a variety of use cases, but work remains to be done on documentation, compatibility, and testing. The long-term goal of the project is to provide a simple, language-agnostic tool that allows journalists to better develop and maintain ambitious data projects