Problem-solving

  Another new Open Education Resource (OER) has been made available by the School of Science and Technology, University of Northampton. Problem-Solving Author: Dr Scott Turner http://find.jorum.ac.uk/resources/19001 Details These mini lectures are intended for undergraduate computing students, for providing simple steps in problem solving before the students learn a programming language. Problem-Solving and Programming is a common first year undergraduate module on the BSc Computing Programme at the University of Northampton. This material was taken from the problem solving part of the module and provides an introduction to five topics in problem-solving. The resource can be found at:  http://find.jorum.ac.uk/resources/19001 After one week on JORUM  93 downloads  and  12 views  of the OER.

Wing Surveys Her New Opportunity - Microsoft Research : Wing Surveys Her New Opportunity By Rob Knies February 28, 2013 1:15 PM PT When Jeannette Wing joined Microsoft Research in January 2013 as a Microsoft vice president and head of Microsoft Research International, in charge of Microsoft Research’s non-U.S. labs, she brought with her a sterling set of credentials. She had served long and well as head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University and for three years as assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). A recipient of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wing has a broad range of expertise, ranging from the foundations of trustworthy computing to software specification and verification to concurrent and distributed systems to programming languages and methodology. A month into her new job, she found time for a wid...

Problem solving is not trivial (Beaumont and Fox, 2003).  In fact, if we think about Bloom’s Taxonomy’s (Bloom 1956) and the Cognitive Domain, problem-solving involves the high-level skills of synthesis, evaluation, analysis and applications, so perhaps it is not surprising that student’s often struggle in this area and with subjects based around problem-solving (such as programming). A much discussed and related area of Computational Thinking ( Wing, 2006) has raised the profile of areas such as problem-solving, by highlighting the importance of “ thinking like a computer scientist ” (Wing 2006). The thought processes involved in being a computer scientist are more complicated than just being able to program, “ Computational thinking is reformulating a seemingly difficult problem into one we know how to solve, perhaps by reduction, embedding, transformation, or simulation. ” (Wing, 2006). The skills of computer scientists are applicable to a much wider range of areas or as W...