Living In the KnowlEdge Society Community Building Project

Track E - Interdisciplinary Problem Solving: Improving Pedagogy through Computational Thinking (Summer Only)

This summer-only track, led by FDI and an interdisciplinary cohort of faculty from Computer Science, Accounting Information Systems, Business Information Technology, and English who comprise the LIKES (Living In the KnowlEdge Society) project team at Virginia Tech, will take participants through a survey of current and emerging instructional technologies that provide the best context for fostering computational thinking. Computational thinking is a 21st-century skill that uses abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task or designing a large complex system. In many ways, computational thinking is a systematic and scientific way of approaching the world (in truth, a type of scholarship or scientific reasoning) and provides a method of interdisciplinary synthesis in problem solving environments.

This track seeks to provide instructional strategies and tools, as well as 1-on-1 help by members of the LIKES team, which will enable faculty to foster these skills in their students. These skills are best learned in context. Examples of this include students who work with interactive simulations in a science class, build a virtual environment for history or architecture, construct hyper-bases in English, or become skilled with Geographic Information System (GIS) software in Geography. This track will help faculty design similar projects within their courses. Participants can expect to learn how to find and adapt high quality educational resources from the National Science Digital Library or other repositories; adapt “Web 2.0” or other social networking software systems for classes; use Second Life, a 3-D environment supporting collaboration, simulation, visualization, and interaction; and enhance courses in the Curriculum for Liberal Education (CLE) so they are “LIKES-designated”, making them eligible for those interested in the LIKES CLE pathway. For those wishing to learn more about computational thinking or LIKES, please visit http://www.livingknowledgesociety.org.