Building A Computational Thinking Course from Scratch
Abstract: After an external review, Carroll University’s mathematics department elected to overhaul its introductory statistics course to better meet the technological needs of Carroll’s students in the twenty-first century. Rather than relying on a lecture-homework-quiz-test format using a calculator, it was decided that students should learn how to perform basic statistical procedures using several different computer-based platforms such as Microsoft Excel and the computer programming language Python. The course is not lecture heavy. Instead, the computational thinking course at Carroll is designed to be a more hands-on experience for the student. The goal is to familiarize the student with how computers work, how easy it is to write a computer program, how to deal with large data sets, and how to recognize which statistical approach is the correct one for the data set at hand.