Comments on: Das Kapital, Computational Thinking, and Productivity

By: Ari Block

Ari Block — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:36:01 +0000

I agree Computational Thinking is very important and can be a very important tool no mater what area you are in. i am wondering why there are no tools to support computational thinking. if we relay want to push this idea i think its more then teaching a powerful way to think but also giving them the power to do something with this thinking method. its like standards committees, whats better defining a standard if how to do something or just providing a tool to do it by the standard very easily. as a programmer i don’t want to implement long standards but i don’t care about taking a ready module with a simple interface that will implement the standard. should we be educating or creating tool for computational thinking ?

By: Experimentation and argumentation « Catenary

Experimentation and argumentation « Catenary — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:14:50 +0000

[...] and argumentation Jump to Comments Just a reflection spawned from a recent post by Greg Wilson and a later discussion at the lab (I had to leave early, so I don’t know how it [...]

By: Titus Brown

Titus Brown — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:59:32 +0000

operationalize?

By: Lorin Hochstein

Lorin Hochstein — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 03:53:05 +0000

You can do an education-style pre-test / post-test experiment. Give the subjects some kind of test before they take the course, and then give them the course, and give them an equivalent test, and check their improvement. Ideally, you’d have a control group that doesn’t take the course, but does do the pre-test and post-test. You then compare the improvement in the treatment group to the control group.

The operationalizing bit where you define the test is tricky, it’s the ever-present construct validity problem that we always do battle with in empirical software engineering research. I am a fan of the Tom Gilb quote: “Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.”

For productivity, I like to measure task completion time (e.g., time to solve a programming problem) along with some measure of quality (e.g., tests passed, expert rating of code quality with blinding). If you are concerned about, say, the subject writing really unmaintainable code, you can structure the task so that they have to make changes they weren’t informed about in advance. If you think of computational thinking as being more conceptual, you can have them solve a problem on paper.

Measuring the productivity/quality of any knowledge worker (e.g., scientist, programmer, teacher, manager, doctor) is a very difficult task. And yet, somehow, I’d be willing to wager that we can all name scientists, programmers, teachers, managers, or doctors we’ve encountered who we recognize as being very productive of very high quality. You’ll never measure it perfectly in a study, but I think you always learn something by trying.

By: Jorge

Jorge — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 02:57:26 +0000

Sounds like you won’t find this “proof” unless you have decent, well grounded constructs of what “productivity of scientific programmers” means, and the best way to develop these constructs is through case studies.

On the other hand, I recognize that more and more I see case studies as the sensible choice for our field, and that your tolerance for them is lower than mine.