It’s important for parents, educators, and students to recognize that computational thinking can be applied across multiple disciplines, including but not limited to technology and computer science. Computational thinking is the common denominator of critical thinking, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) learning, and project-based learning. In addition, computational thinking increases confidence in dealing with ambiguous, complex or open-ended problems.

Computational thinking is comprised of four facets:

• decomposition – breaking something down into parts and dividing up a task

• algorithms – a sequence of steps to solve a problem

• pattern recognition – finding similarities and differences between the parts to make predictions

• abstraction – reviewing how the solution transfers to similar problems