Computational Thinking: A New Digital Literacy

Society and Economy demand skilled professionals in technological industries. There is a current paradox in countries with a high rate of unemployment consisting in unfilled positions for engineers and technicians for the industry and digital services. This has sensitized managers and institutions to address the problem from the point of view of training. There is a new literacy, the digital literacy, and as such we must begin teaching it from the earliest stages of individual development, as well as with other key skills: reading, writing and Math skills. The most frequent approach to teaching digital literacy has been to gradually encourage the learning of programming. It usually consists in teaching children programming tasks, from the simplest and most entertaining to the most complex. But one can raise the question in a different way: The powers of encoding are the most visible part of a way of thinking that is valid not only in the field of mental activity, which supports the development and creation of programs and systems. There is a specific way of thinking, to organize ideas and representations, which is fertile ground and favors computational skills. It is a mindset that leads to the analysis and the relationship of ideas to the organization and logic representation. Those skills favor certain activities and certain learning environments from the early stages. It is the development of a specific way of thinking: computational thinking. In this paper we review forms of thinking which have emerged and have been studied as useful to this way of thinking and problem solving in this cognitive domain. We state they can provide a basis for future development of contents in a curriculum which can be applied to different types and levels of education, as well as to train teachers and professors applying computational thinking.