Reflections about Computational Thinking.

Computational Thinking refers to an idea of how we should structure our thoughts and plan our actions. It's analogous to instructions computers are designed to handle. Whether that's effective or not I'm not really sure.

Okay what I mean is, while our brains are (in a reductive sense) supercharged computers, we're capable of a whole lot more. We're capable of rational thought, we're capable of feeling emotions, we're capable of changing and learning. Computers can't do all that. They process instructions, they execute instructions, there is no level of thought in between those two processes.

The class for this topic was also an offline one. The guest professor opened with a seemingly simple question, "How does a phone screen know what to show you?" His objective was to ask us to begin thinking computationally and think in terms of steps and algorithms.

If you ask me, I don't see the point. I don't think we're designed to think like computers do, simply because we lead lives that are way too much more complicated than computers.

So you're not going to talk about the class?

Not really, the entire class boils down to "there are algorithms that you can create for life." Which I disagree with entirely, it's just another buzzword.

Hmm.. what do you mean?

So let's see it this way, he kept talking about how we can apply computational thinking to our lives. He took the example of starting a business, and being able to describe business requirements. The thing is, everything in our lives, including things like these, are rapidly changing targets. There's no fixed steps to take that would work every time.

Even if you wanted to create some sort of algorithmic approach to doing things in your life. How would you keep accounting for changes that would keep happening because of situations you couldn't account for? Would you keep modifying your algorithm over and over? I hardly think that's feasible.

The better and more natural idea of course is to have a plan and awareness of the situation you're about to walk into. As you move forward through the situation, you should always have the space to fail with grace, to learn and to push forward. Trying to stick to an algorithm would leave you helpless.

I guess what I'm trying to ask of people is for them to live as opposed to just processing instructions laid out for them.