Computational Thinking and Spreadsheets, Teacher Edition (#TeachersCoding)

I ran a workshop last week giving some teachers ideas on how to use computational thinking to improve their workflow. I’ve written in the past about how spreadsheets can serve as a way to get students thinking like programmers, without the intimidation of a text-based development environment. I don’t find teachers any different in this regard.

I spent the beginning of this workshop sharing a bit about my views on why teachers should develop their computational thinking skills. I then set them off to work through answering the following questions about each task in the video below:

• What is the spreadsheet being programmed to do?
• What commands are being used?
• How would I use this in my own practice?

I’m reasonably sure that a majority of teachers have a spreadsheet somewhere that contains student data like the one in the video. My hope is that teachers that watch the video and see what I’ve done with this spreadsheet will have one of a few possible responses:

• Wow, I do that by hand right now. Now I know there’s an easier way that will save me time.
• That isn’t useful to me, but it does give me an idea of how to do some other task that involves iteration, sorting, or another task best suited for a computer.
• I do that already. Is that computational thinking?

If I elicit any of these responses, and then get someone to then build a tool that is useful to him or her, I think I’ve done my job. Learning to code for its own sake isn’t necessarily worth a teacher’s valuable time. Outsourcing tasks that computers do best to a computer can free a teacher to have more time for those tasks that require the expertise, experience, and a personal touch that only a person can provide. If learning a bit of computational thinking can do that, doing so might be worth the time.

Please comment on the video or below to let me know what you think.