Minecraft Education
Minecraft Education provides the opportunity for basic coding concepts and learning about artificial intelligence (AI) using MakeCode. When using the tools in Minecraft Education it's important to understand how programming and gameplay develop computational thinking.
Computational thinking
Computational thinking is simply a way of breaking down problems and solving them. It's similar to scientific and mathematical thinking, but it involves the utilization of technology in the process.
There are four main components to computational thinking:
- Decomposition
- Pattern recognition
- Abstraction
- Algorithmic thinking
Decomposition is the act of breaking a problem down into a series of smaller individual steps. There are often many steps involved in some of your most routine tasks that you don’t even think of as smaller pieces of the whole. How many individual steps do you go through each day before work? You may think of something as one step, like putting on your shoes, that is actually a complicated and ordered list. Did you include deciding which pair to wear or tying the laces? You may not think of these things as ordered steps because you perform these actions so frequently, but each is vital to the process of going through your day.
Pattern recognition is the ability to notice and utilize patterns to help you solve a problem. You may notice that one of your students always wears sneakers and arrives late to your Tuesday lesson after a physical education class across campus. You can anticipate that next Tuesday this student will again be tardy.
Abstraction is the ability to generalize and prioritize patterns you see to understand which helps you solve the problem. This is the ability to see that, in the previous example, the location of the physical education class, and not the sneakers, is the repeated pattern that is causing the problem.
Algorithmic thinking is the practice of creating step-by-step directions that solves and avoids problems. An example of this is giving that same student a list of directions that save them time traveling across campus so they arrive to your class on time.
Reflection
Think through a few personal examples of how you're currently using computational thinking in your life and classroom. How does computational thinking relate to your curriculum and how could it enrich lessons? What are some next steps for including computational thinking into your lesson planning and instruction?