COMPUTATIONAL THINKING FOR AN AI AGE
Transforming K-12 education to develop resilient students for the future of work was a key theme at the recent World Innovation Summit of Education in Doha. Ledetta Asfa-Wossen reports.
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raditionally, education systems across the world have placed the most value on three core subjects, one of which is maths. But in the age of AI, should students be learning
maths in the same way? And, what other skills do students need to stay future-proof ? With AI reshaping industries and workplaces,
understanding the core principles of computational thinking is no longer an option but a necessity, said Conrad Wolfram, co-founder and CEO of the Wolfram Group in his keynote. “For the past 20 or 30 years it’s been obvious that the
subject of mathematics is not aligned with the real world,” he opened. The problem with traditional maths he argued is that humans are doing the calculations. Instead, he described the need for integrated learning across the education system that utilises computational tools.
LEARNING FOR THE REAL WORLD “We have a whole new raft of computational technology of AI, which will affect all subjects in different ways. We don’t know yet how it will affect them in the real world. We are still discovering that. But we need to not make the same mistake we have with mathematics and change quickly,” he warned. Education is in urgent need of updating, but often
the focus is on the wrong thing, argued Wolfram. “New technology changes the real world; therefore, it needs to change what we learn. We can’t just teach the same old subject, because that isn’t what the real world is doing.” The second thing AI changes, which is often the
focus, is the pedagogy. How do we get people to learn well the subject that they need to learn? However, he stated the focus should be more on what students are learning, not just how learning will be delivered. “You need to change the subject, not just how you
teach it. AI drives the need for change, but it also provides the tools to achieve that. We need to reset the curriculum for a sort of human computer optimisation. We are in a world where we are sharing intelligence, which is quintessentially human with machines for the first time. So, we’ve got to ask the question, what is for the machine and what is for the human? And what does that mean about what we need to learn as humans?” While it was agreed by most that some fundamental
elements of education will remain unchanged – certain subjects will be affected more than others and must evolve in order to prepare young people for the world they face. One essential skill for K-12 education and beyond,
according to Wolfram, is computational thinking, or computational literacy.
THE VALUE OF COMPUTATIONAL THINKING Computational thinking is an approach to problem solving that can be transferred to a computer. The view is that it provides a vital link between the creativity and flexibility of the human brain, and the speed and efficiency of computation, so it is a key skill for an AI era. Gone are the days when simply having the hard skills for coding or telling a computer what to do was
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