English Class and Computational Thinking

Computational thinking is defined as “the thought process involved in formulating problems and their solutions so that the solutions are represented in a form that can be effectively carried out by an information-processing agent.” (Yadav, A., Mayfield, C., Zhou, N., Hambrusch, S., & Korb, J.T. (2014). Computational thinking in elementary and secondary teacher education. ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 14(1), 5:1-5:16.) While computational literacies are perhaps more thought of in terms of aiding one in solving mathematical problems and coding, there are other ways in which the development of computational skills can be beneficial to students and their learning.

Arithmetic encompasses a set of mathematic processes that include number sense as well as the understanding of mathematical principles. Computational skills, in terms of arithmetic, requires the selection of the appropriate arithmetic operation as well as the execution of the steps to calculate the solution. As an English teacher, my focus is more so on language arts. Instead of mathematical processes and principles, students have to be able to take apart various texts in order to find connections and hidden meanings within them (i.e. informational literacies). They must be able to listen to slam poetry and be able to connect what they are hearing through this new media to the material they are exploring, to the larger message that is being addressed by the speaker. Students must be able to recognize poetry patters, take a piece of literature that they know nothing about, and deconstruct it or create their own, new patterns based on their interpretations. Being able to quickly and accurately solve problems using mental methods, paper-and-pencil, and other tools, is a necessary tool to finding success within an English course—A course where students are asked to linguistically analyze sentences, as well as identify and represent patterns for different sentence structures.