Algorithmic Thinking

Some of my students care.  Well, enough that they stay after class.  On Mondays, I have class from 10:00am to 12:10, and then another class at 1:25.  So I often just stay in the lab between and answer questions for whatever students was to come talk to me about programming, or computers in general.  Or just about the somewhat complicated way I use my computer.  I demonstrated making a virtual machine, and the students' eyes got big and they thought it was wonderful.  VMs really are cool.  It reminds me of why I did my graduate research on them in the first place.  Anyway, this Monday, I was going over the modulus operator with a student (mod being one of those things that few people who aren't computer scientists use, and on first introduction, it's somewhat incomprehensible why one would ever use it), and had an example with the turtle in which we have a loop that repeats m time but we only want the turtle to draw a circle every 10th time through the loop.  This is a good way to show how useful mod is.  One of the students commented that he didn't understand how computer science people could take a problem and just come up with the steps to solve it.  Good on him for noticing that this is the essence of computer science!  I took the opportunity to wax lyrical about algorithmic thinking.  Frances Allen, who is one of my heroes, being as she is the first woman to win the Turing Award, actually said in a lecture I was privileged to attend "algorithmic thinking is what computer science brings that revolutionizes thinking and is why computer science can become queen of the sciences."  (I might be paraphrasing because I don't remember it exactly).  And talked about how I give them assignments in class and first I talk about how to break the problem into steps and then I try to force people to follow the steps exactly.  (It is amazing how people, given exact pseudocode to follow, don't bother to try following it.)  Anyway, it is students like that that make me think I might not be wasting my time playing around in Africa on government money after all.