Computational Thinking

Alan Jacobs linked to this article recently (PDF):

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/www/publications/Wing06.pdf

I agree with much of what Wing says. I think the article is motivated by a general trend in Computer Science higher education that amounts to CS departments failing to "attract" good students. On the other hand it remains true that computational thinking applied to many other fields (essentially science in general) continues to be the foremost innovation for that field. Wing gets the distinction right that it isn't about programming. The example I always use is that cellular biology must be concerned with how cells communicate and act on each other. This problem has it's theoretical underpinnings in computer science. Not on using computers to run simulations on how cells might communicate (while that can be an interesting thing to study), but on answering questions like "What ways can discrete objects communicate?"

So why, given the importance of computational thinking to so much of science, is Computer Science failing to attract good students who want "go on to a career in medicine, law, business, politics, any type of science or engineering, and even the arts."? In my experience the public perception of CS is that it is all about programming or all about computer hardware. Computer Scientists most important body part is their fingers because that works the keyboard right? The cultural stereotype that gets assigned to Computer Scientists is the geek or nerd. As a consequence people who identify with that stereotype (for whatever reason) see themselves as cast in the role of Computer Scientist regardless of their ability or desire to reason well computationally. The ETS's major field test reports (pdf) that only 28% of CS seniors have an overall GPA above 3.5. Only 36% have that high a GPA in their major. Mathematics comes in at 47% and 43%.

Somehow Mathematics is able to attract thinking students while still getting a similar stereotyping from broader culture and I can't help but think that has to do with the seat it has a the education table as a first class member (never mind that the system at large fails to emphasize the important parts of mathematics). I like Wing's vision of a world where Computational Thinking has a place at that table (though I shudder to think of the tortures the education system could inflict in CS's name).