Tag: Computational Thinking

Liked Computational Thinking for the Educator & Researcher | Dr. Ian O’Byrne (Dr. Ian O’Byrne | Literacy, technology, and education)

This week I presented a session at the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Conference (TLTCon) 2021. TLTCon is a free, fully online conference designed to bring together expertise from educational institutions across the region, spotlight teaching excellence, and provide a space for idea sharing and networking. My session was titled Computational Thinking in the Disciplines:… Continue reading →

Bookmarked Play “What’s The Rule?” to Develop Computational Thinking by Sign in – Google Accounts (W. Ian O'Byrne)

Think of a rule to group some of the objects. It could be something like “all of the animals” or “all of the objects with four sides.”

Slowly add and/or remove objects from the circle to conform to the rules you set. Ask the children to talk and indicate “what’s the rule” that is dictating what you add and remove from the group.

Ian O’Byrne discusses the use of the game ‘What’s the Rule’ to develop Computational Thinking, another unplugged activity.
Liked Review of Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine by Neil MatherNeil Mather (doubleloop.net)

when people talk about whether algorithms are good or bad, they pretty much always mean decision-making algorithms – something that makes a decision that affects a human in some way. So for example long division is an algorithm, but it’s not really having any decision making effect on society. We’re talking more about things like putting things in a category, making an ordered list, finding links between things, and filtering stuff out. And they might be ‘rule-based’ expert systems, in that the creator programs in a set of rules that the system then executes, or more recently machine learning algorithms, where you train an algorithm on a dataset by reinforcing ‘good’ or ‘bad’ behaviour. Often with these we can’t always be sure how the algorithms has come to a conclusion.

So what the book is really focused on is the effect our increased use of decision-making algorithms like these is having on things like power, advertising, medicine, crime, justice, cars and transport, basically stuff that makes up the fabric of society, and where we’re starting to outsource these decisions to algorithms.