Disclaimer - this entry is totally based on MY interpretation of the talk and not what the speaker actually might have meant and I might have misunderstood, and most of the things here are more of my thought than anybody else's.
We had this talk by Jeannette Wing (also known as the Dragon Lady by the people who know her). She was talking about her vision for computer science for the future. This talk made me ask some questions to myself, and I hope one day I might be able to find and answer to them.
The most interesting thing I found was the title of her presentation - Computational Thinking and Thinking about Computing. The way she put forward the idea of Computational Thinking was of the essence of the ability to comprehend a problem and systematically trying to solve it. That is what she claims to be one of the things we learn as computer scientists. She had the vision of trying to teach everybody this way of thinking. The first thought that came to me was the idea of coding/programming - as Douglas Adams put it - "you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with". Somehow I felt this is the most basic and elementary way of picking up computational thinking.
According to her, the biggest question is "What are the effective ways of learning (teaching) computational thinking by (to) children?". Here she provided the analog to mathematics and how children are taught numbers in Kindergarten, algebra in 7th grade, calculus in 12th grade. She wants that computational thinking should be somehow incorporated into the education system as Math itself.
But somehow I feel this thing already exists. It is in every facet of life - it is just that we learn this the hard way through experience. And what I feel is that it is kind of thing that you have to learn, you can't put it in somebody's mind. Maybe I am totally wrong!
Somehow I think of something different - I feel we are trying to answer the wrong question. I feel the main purpose of computational thinking should be such that we can find a solution to any problem, but somehow utilize the good things about computers. The computers themselves cannot solve problems of any consequence (or maybe they can) - but they are useful in a lot of many different ways and it would be a lie to say we can't solve difficult problem relatively easily with the help of computer. So the goal should be to teach people to optimally use everything that a computer has to provide for our help, but also develop better computers which are more helpful - a symbiotic relationship if you may (if you consider computers alive that is, but then they have some intelligence and they can accomplish non-trivial things, so maybe they are actually living things).
I don't know, this is kind of what I feel computer science should be - to help people solve problems - not make people dumb, but I don't know how that can be achieved in the right combination.
Another thing I found interesting about her talk was her reference to how people are attracted to certain sciences - origin of life leads to biology, the origin of time and universe leads to physics. I guess the origin of intelligence leads to computer science. It is just that maybe in all the different things going all around in computer science, we have lost the actual question.
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