{"id":4,"date":"2009-03-08T06:52:43","date_gmt":"2009-03-08T12:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=4"},"modified":"2009-03-27T13:22:14","modified_gmt":"2009-03-27T17:22:14","slug":"computational-thinking-vs-systems-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2009\/03\/computational-thinking-vs-systems-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Computational Thinking vs. Systems Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greg<\/a> reminded me the other day about Jeanette Wing<\/a>‘s writings about “computational thinking<\/a>“. Is this what I have in mind when I talk about the contribution software engineers can make in tackling the climate crisis? Well, yes and no. I think that this way of thinking about problems is very important, and corresponds with my intuition that learning how to program changes how you think.<\/p>\n

But ultimately, I found Jeanette’ description of computational thinking to be very\u00a0disappointing, because she concentrates too much on algorithmics and machine metaphors. This reminds me of the model of the mind as a computer<\/a>, used by cognitive scientists – it’s an interesting perspective that opens up new research directions, but is ultimately limiting because it leads to the problem of disembodied cognition<\/a>: treating the mind as independent from it’s context. I think software engineering (or at least systems analysis) adds something else, more akin to systems thinking<\/a>. It’s the ability to analyse the interconnectedness<\/a> of multiple systems. The ability to reason about multiple stakeholders and their interdependencies<\/a> (where most of the actors are not computational devices!). And the rich set of abstactions we use to think about structure, behaviour and function of very complex systems-of-systems<\/a>.\u00a0Somewhere in the union of computational thinking and systems thinking.<\/p>\n

How about “computational systems-of-systems thinking”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greg reminded me the other day about Jeanette Wing‘s writings about “computational thinking“. Is this what I have in mind when I talk about the contribution software engineers can make in tackling the climate crisis? Well, yes and no. I think that this way of thinking about problems is very important, and corresponds with my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,57],"tags":[39,56,38],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}