Computational Thinking and Data

Have you ever considered how important Data is when using digital technologies?
It wasn't something I had considered until I was a recent STEM symposium with AISNSW. There had been a discussion of what is being done about Big Data and the issues that surround this problem.

Data is how digital technologies stores and sorts information. It is the facts that come from numerical, categorical and textual sources of information that can be measured, calculated and stored. It impacts computational thinking because computers need processes to know what to do with this information.

Data Collection focuses on the how the information is obtained. Teaching students about this process will help them to gain an understanding of the process that is needed to obtain data and the way that it can be used.

Examples of Data Collection

The following are ways that students can collect data, which they can apply to a range of different sets:

sorting through different categories
survey or questionnaires
observation
interviews
records

The reason that Data is important to Computational Thinking is that we need to have an input. It is the starting point for analysing the information that we have found out about a topic, person or the world around us. We take the data and start to categorise the information, looking for patterns, similarities and differences that will help us to make sense of the information.

How do you use Data in your classroom? Have you applied computational thinking to the lesson?

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