Fireside Chat with Sarah Aslanifar
summary
Argues that computational thinking is a practical cognitive tool not a CS-only skill and demonstrates it with two concrete experiments: built a model of a mosh pit to study collective behavior and a classroom exercise where 20 kids sort cards in five minutes by bucketing then recombining, which the children reuse the next day for their writing assignments. Recommends lightweight tooling for rapid tests, e.g. Jupyter notebooks for quick experiments, and warns that story points and crude metrics often mislead unless paired with models and observable validation.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Welcome and introduction
- 1:06Mosh pits as complex systems
- 3:13Complex vs complicated systems
- 5:39Human brains and pattern recognition
- 6:43Computational thinking and predictions
- 8:54Story points and measurement pitfalls
- 11:19Learning from failure in projects
- 12:21Software engineering responsibility
- 13:02Computational thinking vs scientific method
- 15:49Teaching computational thinking
- 17:33Surprises in computational thinking
- 19:40Closing remarks
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