Carrie Antonazzi is a woman with a lot of enthusiasm, and for good reason! She has something awesome and exciting to share. She works for BC’s Science World outreach programs and she’s dedicated to making teaching coding accessible and easy to teachers across the province.

To do so she really wanted us to engage in computational thinking, a form of critical thinking that engages us in breaking down information into steps and processes through decomposition, abstraction, patterning, algorithmic thinking and generalization. She showed us that a lot of the time, when solving problems, we think like a computer!

This was quite the insight, and she launched us into some easy and interactive activities that activate our computational thinking skills. After each activity, we would reflect on what thinking skills we used, and why. This eventually drove us to the conclusion that we were ‘coding’ our own brains to complete a task, and our brains are much more complex and intricate machines than most computers!

If we can program ourselves to complete complex and difficult tasks, then using the same set of thinking skills we should be able to translate our ‘new’found abilities to the computer as well. It was quite the epiphany, and presented in such a way that you could have students see it the same.

After all, our minds are nothing less than the most complex machine that we have yet to understand!