/blog_archive/2012/04/27/computational-thinking-why-do-we-need-to-do-this/ iteration, making, building, and coding in education Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:19:10 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.7.6 /blog_archive/2012/04/27/computational-thinking-why-do-we-need-to-do-this/#comment-65 Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:19:10 +0000 http://evanweinberg.com/?p=513#comment-65 This outstanding. I really like how you are pushing students to see the value of computational thinking by creating situations where using a computer to do repeated calculations is necessary. I find myself trying to do the same thing in physics, but it seems harder in the beginning where most of the problems (constant velocity, acceleration, etc) are so easily solved by hand. But we did recently come up with a problem where computation was ideal—find the time it takes for two masses separated by 10 meters in deep space to come together via gravitational attraction. It took a 9th grader less than a day to write a program to answer this question, and it’s something I’m still trying to compute analytically.

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