"Children should be taught how to think, not what to think"-Margaret Mead.

Today for our Mind Lab session we looked into what "Computation thinking" is.
Again, this was a new knowledge for myself as before taking mind lab sessions I did not know what Computational thinking was. So the question now is for me "What is computational thinking".

Computational thinking is an approach to problem solving. It  involves taking part of problem and figuring out how to attack it using what we know about computation.  There are 4 major dimensions of Computational thinking. These are:

1. Decomposition: Breaking something down and figuring out what all the parts are and how you might divide up the tasks.  
2. Pattern recognition: This is where you find similarities and differences between these parts in order to make predictions. 
3. Abstraction: Which involves finding the general principals that generate these patterns. 
4. Algorithm design: Which involves developing step by step instructions that solve similar problems. 

Computational thinking helps students in increasing confidence in dealing with ambiguous, complex or open ended problems. 

Computational Thinking Concept	Computer Science Application
Break a problem into parts or steps	Break a computational graph problem into 4 sections, each one to be completed by a different computer processor
Recognise and find patterns or trends	Visualise data comparing microchip material and computer speed to notice a trend
Develop instructions to solve a problem or steps for a task	Write a computer program to sort data
Generalise patterns and trends into rules, principles, or insights	Realise complex data structures require less code than complex pro

This chart shows how computational thinking differs from computer science. 

This also involves creating through technologies and students being able to express themselves through technologies. For students to be able to think computationally is to be be able to create by using technologies and coding to solve problems. 

We then looked at the programme Scratch. This programme I have seen before but had not explored in depth so I was really looking forward to exploring with it.

-Scratch for Educators: coding for interactive stories, animations and game.
We talked about Pair programming. This is where you collaborate with other person to get a better end results. 

Its the Pedagogy that is important not the tool. 

We used Scratch as a pair task one being the navigator and the other drawing.(Pair programming). It was very useful and two minds working together worked really well and made the task easier. 

We made the cat draw a hexagon, circle, triangle and square.

Here is a photo of myself and my colleague Juanita working together on Scratch. 

We then went onto talking about Leadership and growth Mindset. 

As a class we had to take a quiz about mind sets and weather we had a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. I have included my results below.

Leadership: Developing a growth mindset. 

YES!! I have a growth mindset. This pedagogy is practiced daily in my classroom. And I am a huge believer in growth mindsets. We then watched a video. I have included this video below. 

Knowledge is not understanding. 

Theory: "Intelligence has become more defined as the kind of mind that responds most readily to the peculiar demands of school" 

Previous: There is a fixed intelligence that can be measured using and IQ test. No matter how much you learn, or how how hard you work your intelligence stays the same. 

Strengthening brain neurons in the brain through learning and creating. 

We then had to use a stop motion tool to create a short stop motion on growth and fixed mindset. 

Myself and my mind lab colleague Juanita chose to use PicPac. This was new to myself and her and we could use the app on our phone through downloading it on google play store which was was very assible. We really enjoyed collaborating with each other and creating the stop motion video on the mindsets. Here is our completed video for you to view.

PicPac Stop motion movie on Growth VS fixed mindset. 


Overall today's session was awesome and I learnt so many new things that I have added to my mental schema which I will take back to my classroom and implement.