Teaching programming with computational and informational thinking

Computers are the dominant technology of the early 21st century: pretty well all aspects of economic, social and personal life are now unthinkable without them. In turn, computer hardware is controlled by software, that is, codes written in programming languages. Programming, the construction of software, is thus a fundamental activity, in which millions of people are engaged worldwide, and the teaching of programming is long established in international secondary and higher education. Yet, going on 70 years after the first computers were built, there is no well-established pedagogy for teaching programming. There has certainly been no shortage of approaches. However, these have often been driven by fashion, an enthusiastic amateurism or a wish to follow best industrial practice, which, while appropriate for mature professionals, is poorly suited to novice programmers. Much of the difficulty lies in the very close relationship between problem solving and programming. Once a problem is well characterised it is relatively straightforward to realise a solution in software. However, teaching problem solving is, if anything, less well understood than teaching programming. Problem solving seems to be a creative, holistic, dialectical, multi-dimensional, iterative process. While there are well established techniques for analysing problems, arbitrary problems cannot be solved by rote, by mechanically applying techniques in some prescribed linear order. Furthermore, historically, approaches to teaching programming have failed to account for this complexity in problem solving, focusing strongly on programming itself and, if at all, only partially and superficially exploring problem solving. Recently, an integrated approach to problem solving and programming called Computational Thinking (CT) (Wing, 2006) has gained considerable currency. CT has the enormous advantage over prior approaches of strongly emphasising problem solving and of making explicit core techniques. Nonetheless, there is still a tendency to view CT as prescriptive rather than creative, engendering scholastic arguments about the nature and status of CT techniques. Programming at heart is concerned with processing information but many accounts of CT emphasise processing over information rather than seeing then as intimately related. In this paper, while acknowledging and building on the strengths of CT, I argue that understanding the form and structure of information should be primary in any pedagogy of programming

An overview of decision table literature 1982-1995.

This report gives an overview of the literature on decision tables over the past 15 years. As much as possible, for each reference, an author supplied abstract, a number of keywords and a classification are provided. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. The literature is classified according to application area, theoretical versus practical character, year of publication, country or origin (not necessarily country of publication) and the language of the document. After a description of the scope of the interview, classification results and the classification by topic are presented. The main body of the paper is the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.

Towards Learning at Scale for Everybody: Applying Action Research to Design an Upskilling Platform for Marginalized Adults

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a scalable technology for upskilling but have primarily been successful with highly resourced and well-educated populations. In spite of their low barriers, people experiencing homelessness have not generally benefited from MOOCs. Work-Learn is a new model which utilizes action design research in order to provide individuals experiencing homelessness with the skills and scaffolding that will enable them to benefit from the digital economy. This Work in Progress reports the results of interviews and focus groups focusing on minimum hiring requirements, conducted with eight individuals who are in senior leadership, hiring managers, or training for web development or enterprise computing functions. Preliminary results suggest that after a baseline aptitude has been established, that person-position fit is the critical aspect to consider in instances of homelessness. The mainframe community may represent a unique opportunity due in part to its need for new talent

Critical Skills of IS Professionals: Developing a Curriculum for the Future

A study was conducted to determine the expected skills and knowledge required for Information Systems professionals in three general staffing groups: programmers, analysts, and end-user support. A survey instrument was developed asking respondents to rate the importance of each knowledge/skill area three years from now for each of the staffing groups. The results show that Information Systems knowledge relating to the entire organization and overall business knowledge will be important with less emphasis being placed on specific Information Systems such as Decision Support Systems (DSS) and Executive Support Systems (ESS). More importance will be placed on web-based languages rather than more traditional languages such as COBOL. The so-called \u27soft skills\u27 such as teamwork, collaboration, writing and presentation delivery, and interpersonal and management skills will be critical for success in the Information Systems profession

Information Systems Curricula 2003

The goal of the study is to determine which courses are currently being offered in Information Systems (IS) undergraduate College of Business programs, to profile these curriculums, and to compare this profile to the most recent IS model curriculum--the IS 2002 Model Curriculum.  Of 330 university web sites examined with potential IS undergraduate degree programs, 222 web sites were identified with complete information on program requirements.  The resulting profile matches the IS 2002 Model in eight out of eleven courses with two Model courses being represented by two profile courses each and one profile course not matching a Model course.