Dan’s Blog

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-07

Posted by admin in Uncategorized on February 7th, 2010

Obama said he ran "to get the hard things done". Guess we just have different views of what those things should be! #
@joefeser good info. Thanks Joe! Using tier seems confusing but you have educated me. in reply to joefeser #
Just watched a crock take down a wildabeast in slow mo! Makes me anxious to take on the competition! #
Education-the only product we buy & are happy when we don't get all that we paid for. Just ask a student whose class just got cancelled! #
One of the biggest weekends in the history of @worthwhile! Launching the next generation of our company software – it runs our world! #
Capitalist says "u scratch my back & I'll scratch yours". Socialist says "u scratch my back or I'll break yours". #
Playing the board game of catan with the Arthurs is like family feud on steroids! #

The Business of Computational Thinking

Posted by admin in CpS 111, Education on February 5th, 2010

We (my computer science education world) are creating a new course for all of our liberal arts students to take that is intended to teach them what computation thinking is, why they should know it, and how they will use it. For more details on this, I refer you to

I just came across a current example of how I applied CT skills to solve an immediate problem. I think it will help demonstrate what CT skills are and how they apply to our everyday life. Here’s the background on the problem I faced.

I enjoy competition. As a kid I loved playing Monopoly, Risk, Life, Stratgo. I can remember Risk games with guys in my neighborhood which would go on for days. It was a blast. The thrill of victory. Leaning how to deal with defeat. Working harder next time to avoid it! The other day I was watching one of these “Amazing Planet” shows where the focus was on animals of prey. They showed a huge crock laying a river as a heard of wildebeests ran threw. Then suddenly the crock lunges up and locks his massive jaws down on the leg of an ususpecting wildebeests. The commentator said “And the crock never lets go”. I got thinking about that as it relates to my bit business ventures. I like to lock onto a problem and never let go until the problem is no more. We’ll part of my education world allows me to track a select group of computer science students to intercollegiate programming contests. Part of this process involves creating a new problem set for each competition. The challenge of the problem set, a job for the judges, is to come up with just the right mix of problems that will

all be solved by at least one team
not all be solved by all teams
allow every team to solve at least one
keep the contestants problem solving for the entire length of the contest, usually 5 hours

Here are the pieces needed for each problem, usually 7-10 problems per contest

a concise written description of the problem w/o ambiguities (perhaps the toughest part)
sample test data with expected results to show an example, yet not give away all the potential “tricks”
a solution that solves the problem correctly for all possible valid input data
test data for the judges to use to test the student solutions – here’s where you try and catch the unexpected
expected results for the test data

So here I am working on my problem, the details of which must remain fairly vague for this blog since the contest is still a few weekends away, and I need to come up with some test data. The problem I created involves roads, Starbucks and distances. I wanted to have several thousand data points in the test. Here are the steps I followed to create the test data

using google maps I determined the actual distance between the 2 locations (part of the problem)
using google search engine I obtained actual street names, about 2800
using Excel I loaded the street names
the rest of the steps (3) involved using Excel to combine the street names with some other numeric data, the details of which I must keep secret for now
finally I exported the data out of Excel into the test file needed for the contest

In all I spent about 10 minutes creating a test file of 2800 records that will be used in the competition. None of this required any “computer programming”. But all of it required using existing software to solve my problem. This is an example of what computational thinking is and how it will impact everyone’s life as they live and work in an increasingly computer technologically filled world in which problem solving advances to a higher level as people learn how to combine their creative minds with the power of computational processes. This is computation thinking!

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