UNC Pre-Service Computational Thinking (CT) Materials

Mapping of Activities to CT

Draft Course Materials

• Nim
• Nim - middle school lesson plan
• Nim12marbles - Scratch demo
• NimRandomMarbles - Scratch demo
• Nim Strategy Worksheet
• Muddy City
• Muddy City - lesson plan
• Muddy City Worksheets - two worksheets
• Codebreaker - was Mastermind
• Codebreaker - middle school lesson plan
• Codebreaker slides supporting material
• Codebreaker worksheets
• 20 Questions
• 20 Questions - middle school lesson plan
• 20 Questions Worksheets
• Working with datasets
• Fruitvale
• CORGIS - under development
• Visualizer Datasets
• BlockPy

CT Defined

What do we mean by Computational Thinking? CS Principles courses focus on "big ideas" and "practices." In 2015, CSTA identified the following 5 components of CT:

• Data representation
• Pattern Recognition
• Problem Decomposition
• Algorithmic Thinking
• Abstraction

These are not the only possible components, but they form a reasonable foundation. There are many papers and resources related to CT. Here are a few that have inspired this work.

• Computational Thinking: It represents a universally applicable attitude and skill set everyone, not just computer scientists, would be eager to learn and use.
• Opertional definition of CT
• Introducing Computational Thinking in Education Courses
• Computing with CORGIS: Diverse, Real-world Datasets for Introductory Computing