Jeanette Wing, rather than saying that computer science is just for computer scientists, has championed the idea that computer science is for everyone.

She has done this by writing and talking about Computational Thinking,  a set of basic skills which help us understand problems in ways that computer scientists find particularly useful. One example of computational thinking is to break a problem down into parts so that you can just focus on one part at a time, this is called decomposition.  Another example, generalisation, is to find a common solution that can be applied to many different problems.  These handy techniques are not only useful if you are going to develop a computer program but also if you are going to design a car or do some DIY in your home.

Read more about Computational Thinking on the  cs4fn website.

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CLASSROOM IDEAS

Computing & any other subject. Find out about computational thinking and think about how it is seen in other subjects. For example, in literacy when you break a story plan into parts (decomposition) or in cookery when you replace parts of a recipe with ‘standard ways to do basic things’ such as making a tomato sauce for a lasagne (generalisation).

This work was supported by the Institute of Coding, which is supported by the Office for Students (OfS).