Episode 17: Abstraction and Analytical Thinking

Kelly and Sean get motivation from Michael Kennedy’s Talk Python to Me podcast episode Beginners and Experts. Where Michaels and the panelists discuss, how do you go about attacking a problem? In this episode, Kelly and Sean digest abstraction and analytical thinking in the school setting and how computational thinking plays a part in all this. They discuss the activities that are used to help promote these skills.

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Links:

• Information Fluency | Global Digital Citizen Foundation — The 5As of Information Fluency are Ask, Acquire, Analyze, Apply, and Assess. This video shows how they can help you master the staggering quantity of online information we face every day.
• Homepage — WE TRANSFORM LEARNING AROUND THE WORLD THROUGH
  OUR APPS, RESOURCES, PROFESSIONAL LEARNING,
  CONSULTANCY AND FOUNDATION.
• Abstraction | Teaching London Computing: A RESOURCE HUB from CAS LONDON & CS4FN — Abstraction is a way to make problems or systems easier to think about. It simply involves hiding detail – removing unnecessary complexity. The skill is in choosing the right detail to hide so that the problem becomes easier without losing anything that is important. It is used as a way to make it easier to create complex algorithms, as well as whole systems. A key part of it is in choosing a good representation of a system. Different representations make different things easy to do.
• The 5th ‘C’ of 21st Century Skills? Try Computational Thinking (Not Coding) | EdSurge News — Does current K-12 education equip every student with the requisite skills to become innovators and problem-solvers, or even informed citizens, to succeed in this world with pervasive computing?
• Support Teaching Python on Patreon — We set up this Patreon to help offset website fees and to hire a professional audio editor to ensure that our episodes sound great and get posted quickly. When we reach $100 per month, we're going to set up a monthly Teaching Python conference call for patrons.