Practical Exploration of Integrating Computational Thinking into University Computer Foundation Education

Abstract

Computational thinking is an important concept that is widely concerned by international computer community, and it is considered as an important way to carry out university computer education reform. This paper firstly analyzes the existing problems in university computer teaching for non-computer majors, and then it discusses a series of teaching practices that integrate computational thinking into university computer teaching, including: (1) Students are divided into different classes according to their computer proficiency; (2) We abandon the concept of “Narrow Instrumentalism”, and teach the most essential knowledge of computer foundation; (3) We propose the “data” as the mainline, and then reconstruct teaching content according to the mainline; (4) We also reconstruct experimental content with the mainline, and separate experimental teaching into a single course. The practices has proved that the teaching methods put forward in this paper yield good results, and it provides a new model for University Computer Foundation teaching, which aims at improving students’ computational thinking.