The abstraction of how computers work is causing students to be confused on what goes on inside a computer

Byryan

Computational thinking has been a hugely successful idea and is now taught at school in many countries across the world. Although I welcome the positioning of computer science as a respectable, influential intellectual discipline, in my view computational thinking has abstracted us too far away from the heart of computation – the machine. The world would be a tedious place if we had to do all our computational thinking ourselves; that’s why we invented computers in the first place. Yet, the new school curricula across the world have lost focus on hardware and how code executes on it.

Source: What Children Want to Know About Computers | blog@CACM | Communications of the ACM

Is this because of the block-type programming, such as Scratch, which is prevalent today? I do like how certain projects on code.org will let you use the blocks editor or write the code, but maybe these interfaces need to go deeper. One change that I know has affected computer understanding is the lack of exposure to numbers in different bases. Computer love base-2 and base-16 numbering system, and I was taught different bases in elementary school, but it seems that the different bases aren’t taught any more.

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