Computational Thinking Activity

Group Activity Worksheet - Computational Thinking

Computational thinking can be broken down into four universally recognized components:

1. Decomposition
2. Pattern recognition
3. Abstraction
4. Algorithms

A. Computational Thinking in Your Daily Lives

Discuss where you practice computational thinking in your daily lives without even realizing it. The examples I gave you related to school work you may have done, you, of course, can include addtional school examples, but I also want you to go further than what you do in school. Where else do you practice these components? What are those examples?

B. Applying What You Learn

Pick one or more of the following challenges to complete as a group.

1. Decomposition - the ability to break a larger problem down into smaller parts

Mary had a bad day. She woke up late, didn’t have any clean clothes so had to borrow her older brother's clothes which were too big for her. She didn’t have any more of her favorite cereal, so she had to eat oatmeal for breakfast which she hated. This put her in a bad mood, so she yelled at her little sister and made her cry. She stormed out of the kitchen and forgot her homework on the kitchen table. As she was running to catch the bus, she tripped on her brother's too-large pants and fell — skinning her knee and missing the bus. She walked to school which made her late to class so she missed an opportunity to sign up for the extra credit she needed to bring her grade up to a C....

"Decompose" the above situation into multiple, smaller independent problems that Mary could solve to have a better day tomorrow.

2. Pattern recognition - being able to identify similarities within problems

Solve the following puzzles:

1. What is the next term?
   18, 15, 12, 9, ....
2. What comes next?
   10, 18, 13, 21, 16, 24, 19, 27, ...
3. What comes next?

4. What number goes in the blank?
   __, 5,9, 17, 29, 45, ...
5. What goes in the blank? HINT: Thinking Rounding
   41.3 --> 4  30.1 --> 3
   56.1 --> 6  44.33 --> 4
   78.28 --> 8  29.18 --> 3
   24.44 --> 2  56.11 --> __

(If you want to do more pattern puzzles at a later time, check out BrainGymmer or Brilliant.)

3. Abstraction - conceptual process where general rules and concepts are derived from usage and classification of specific examples

For each of the following examples, extract out the general rule that could be applied to multiple different situations.

4. Algorithmic thinking - when you develop a step-by-step process or rules to follow to solve a problem

Write algorithms to accomplish the given task:

Challenge Question

The first 4 Fibonacci numbers are 0, 1, 1, and 2, what is the twelfth number?

1. 55
2. 77
3. 88
4. 89