a different way of thinking, called CT”
and “learning about programming is a
way to discover the rudiments of CT.”
It emerges, from these three ex-
amples, that CT is not a new subject
to teach and what should be taught in
school is informatics.

But on the other side, the high number of papers published with CT in their title or abstract (the ACM Digital Library alone contains more than 400) indicates a lot of people seem to argue (and even Wing seemed to agree21) that CT is something new and different. Some even say “coding” (which they consider different from “programming”) is all you need to learn it! A discussion of risks related to this approach and other delicate issues regarding CT appeared in a recent Communications column. 8

I am convinced that considering CT as something new and different is misleading: in the long run it will do more harm than benefit to informatics. After all, they do not teach “linguistic thinking” or “mathematical thinking” in schools and they do not have “body of knowledge” or “assessment methods” for these subjects. They just teach (and assess competences in) “English”b and “Mathematics.” Subsequently, the various linguistic (resp. mathematical) competences gained by study of English (resp. Mathematics), beyond being used in themselves, find additional uses in other disciplines. Between CT and computing there exists the same relation. Therefore, we should discuss what to teach and how to evaluate competences regarding informatics in pri-mary/middle/secondary schools, and forget about teaching and evaluating competences in CT.

In summary, speaking about CT helps people understand that: we are focusing on scientific and cultural aspects of computing; we are not dealing with system and tools, but with principles and methods; we are focusing on the core scientific concepts of computing, on its conceptual kernel. 11 Different from what happens with language and math, we are forced to explicit this distinction since computers are what embodies informatics for most of people. In addition, we do not think the “computer scientists’ way of thinking” is better than others, just that it offers a complemen- b Or the relevant native language.

Viewpoint risks spoiling the original aim. Increasingly, people are considering CT a new subject, somehow different or distinct from computer science. In the quest to identify the definition that Wing did not provide, people are stressing one or other aspect (abstraction, recursivity, problem solving, …) and in doing so they obscure its meaning. See Armoni2 and Denning5 for clear and illuminating discussions of this issue.

This situation becomes even more garbled when it comes to education. Speaking about teaching CT is a very risky attitude: philosophers, rightly, ask what we mean by “teaching thinking”; mathematicians appropriately observe that many characteristics of CT (such as abstraction, recursivity, problem solving, …) are also proper of mathematics (which they do not call “mathematical thinking”); pedagogues ask how we can be sure CT is really effective in education; teachers want to know which are the methods and the tools for teaching this new discipline and how they can learn to teach it; and parents are alternately happy because it appears school has finally started to align itself to the digital society while they are also concerned about what will happen to their children in the future if they just learn to code with the language of today.

I think a large part of the community of computing scientists and educators is convinced the original Communications Viewpoint by Wing was aiming at “start rolling the ball” and what needs to be done is teaching informatics in schools, possibly beginning at an early age. Moreover, I am convinced the same people are fully able to understand the meaning of Wing’s expression “to think like a computer scientist” without the need of exactly explaining it. Or, if it is absolutely needed, they might agree with the self-referential sentence “CT is the set of mental and cognitive competences obtained by the study and practice of computer science”: the “tacit knowledge” defined by Polanyi. 14

Already in 1974 Knuth warned, in
discussing computer science, that
“the underlying concepts are much
more important than the name.” 10 It is
much more so, I think, for CT. What re-
ally counts is the fact that computing is
taught early in schools. This is actually
the path being followed by some ma-
jor countries. Here, I discuss the three
most relevant ones.

In England, the national computing programmes of study,a published by the Department of Education in September 2013 and mandatory since school year 2014–2015, uses CT in the presented sense of what one gets by the study and practice of computing. In fact, it uses it in the opening statement “A high-quality computing education equips pupils to use CT and creativity to understand and change the world” and then just two more times, in goals for Key Stage 3 “understand several key algorithms that reflect CT” and KS4 “develop and apply their analytic, problem-solving, design, and CT skills.” The curriculum never defines the term.

In the U.S., the “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA), approved by Congress in 2015 with bipartisan support, has introduced computer science among the “well rounded educational subjects” that needs to be taught in schools “with the purpose of providing all students access to an enriched curriculum and educational experience,” and does not contain at all the term “computational thinking.” In January 2016, President Obama launched the initiative “CS For All” whose goal is “to empower all American students from kindergarten through high school to learn computer science and be equipped with the CT skills they need …”. Once again, CT is what you get when you have learned computer science.

In France, the Académie des Sciences—the highest institution representing French scientists—published in May 2013 the report “L’enseignement de l’informatique en France. Il est urgent de ne plus attendre,” (“Teaching computer science in France. Tomorrow can’t wait.”) recommending—for what regard the teaching of computer science (“informatique”)—“teaching should start at the primary level, through exposure to the notions of computer science and algorithms, … <and> should be further developed in middle and secondary school.” Analyzing their use of CT (“pensée informatique”), it is clear that in their vision the term denotes the specific habits of thinking developed by learning computer science. Just a couple of examples: “computing … leads to a See https://bit.ly/1f7PIFU