Case of Reform on School andHigher Education“Computational Thinking”

Maitree Inprasitha, Ph.D.
Vice President for Education and Academic Services, Khon Kaen University, Thailand (KKU)
Acting Director, Institute for Research and Development for Teaching Profession for ASEAN
President, Thailand Society of Mathematics Education (TSMEd)
APEC HRD Lesson Study Project Overseers

International Committee (IC) of PME

The Khon Kaen 30 years project (2000 - 2030)
started on how to change the wayof teaching focusing on changing
the problem we use inmathematical activity

2030

Higher-order Thinking Project200620012013

20172007

Plane 30yearsproject(2000 2030)

2002first group of student
teachers started
implementing "openended problems" in 7schools nearby Khon
Kaen City1999

2013 - present expanded
to 120 schools across thecountries.

started 4 projectschools using "wholeschool approach" toimplement "lesson
study" and "OpenApproach"2005 - present started APEC Lesson Study Community in
APEC and Non-APEC members economies

Strengthen
Network

Invested in HRD
2000-20102011-2020

started small tried the idea of using "open-ended
community of problems" to create mathematical
Lesson Study
activities with 800 teachers in
expanded to 23 schools
with a group ofKhon Kaen Province
in the northeast andstudent teachers
northern parts of(15 students)

Expand acrossthe country andregion2021-2030

Thailand

2000

2003 2005

2009

2012

2

What is Computational Thinking?
“The only way to rectify our reasoning is to makethem as tangible as those of the mathematicians, sothat we can find our error at a glance, and when there
are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us
calculate, without further ado, to see who is right”.
(Leibnitz, 1685)
This means, decomposing arguments in term of thousands of simpleunits, which can be recombined and thus able to be expressed and performed asmechanical computations.

What is Computational Thinking?
“Computational Thinking is the thoughtprocesses involved in formulating a problem andexpressing its solution(s) in such a way that acomputer – human or machine – can effectively
carry out”.
(Jeannette Wing, 2006)

What is Computational Thinking?
“Computational Thinking is understood asa problem solving paradigm of mathematizing aproblem in such a way that the computer canexecute it.”(Tin Lam, 2020)

Computational Thinking
is very powerful forProblem Solving

Figure 1: Programming Thinking adapted from Kano (2020)

What students
need to be?

Computational thinking has close
connections with epistemology, ethics
and wisdom

All of them share several core concepts
such as knowledge,
learning, andvalues

Computational thinking provide tools to design
intelligent and moral artificial agents that accompanies andgive emotional and intelligent support to us.

Consider the case of an accident in an autonomous vehicle.

Who is responsible?
What happens if the accident is due to a system error, ordue to an error in design flaws?
But what happens if the vehicle learns autonomously?

Figure 2: Curriculum Framework for Computational Thinking on InMside

This model will become the reference
implementation framework model in carrying out thedesign process of curriculum formulation andimplementation of the new curriculum proposed ineach APEC member economies forhigh school,
middle school andprimary school respectively.

THANK YOU
Maitree Inprasitha, Ph.D.
Vice President for Education and Academic Services, Khon Kaen University, Thailand (KKU)
Acting Director, Institute for Research and Development for Teaching Profession for ASEAN
President, Thailand Society of Mathematics Education (TSMEd)
APEC HRD Lesson Study Project Overseers

International Committee (IC) of PME