Computational Thinking

Abstract

Information technologies are the base of the world infrastructure. In this social context, education, like any productive or service sector, is affected by technology. Faced with this reality, educational systems must prepare our young people to live in the digital world, for which they must be proficient in a new language without which they will become digital illiterates. Therefore, in school we should not only train in linguistic and numerical literacy, but also in digital literacy. So far, the effort has been oriented mainly to convert our young people into users of computer tools. This has gone from being necessary to being insufficient, because the use of software applications means to manage a digital language that is obsolete in a time that is not proportional, in effort, to the time that has been invested in acquiring these skills. Therefore, the challenge is to prepare our young people to face the world in which they live, giving them the necessary cognitive tools to succeed in the digital world. That is, instead of teaching students only the syntax of a changing language, they should be instructed in the rules that allow them to know how the digital language is constructed. Thus, computational thinking emerges as a paradigm of work, and the programming is stablished as the tool to solve problems.