Computational Thinking

This pocket-sized introduction to computational thinking and problem-solving traces its genealogy centuries before the digital computer.

A few decades into the digital era, scientists discovered that thinking in terms of computation made possible an entirely new way of organizing scientific investigation. Eventually, every field had a computational branch: computational physics, computational biology, computational sociology. More recently, “computational thinking” has become part of the K–12 curriculum. But what is computational thinking? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible overview—tracing a genealogy that begins centuries before digital computers and portraying computational thinking as the pioneers of computing have described it.

The authors explain that computational thinking (CT) is not a set of concepts for programming; it is a… Keep Reading