A New 21st Century Skill in Education: Computational Thinking

Increasing communication channels and technology taking place in all life, cause the events and problems in every-day life to be complicated. In order to keep up with this change, to cope with the problems and ultimately to be successful in this process, individuals need to have various skills. In this sense, 21st century skills are kept up-to-date and dynamic in order to meet the needs of individuals. Problem solving ability, which is one of the 21st century skills, is more important for all ages as it includes more than one skill. Computational thinking, which is defined as a kind of problem solving skill, has become today's one of the compelling areas of competence and drawing attention all over the world. It is possible to see this concept frequently in recent years in curriculums, international standards, activities of institutions and qualified work. In this study, the concept is defined and informations about its content, importance, how it became popular, its dimensions and its place in curriculums of our country are given. Document analysis method was preferred in this study and data from trusted sources such as articles, theses and web sites of world-renowned institutions were used. Describing the term which was first used in 1980s and became popular in 2000s, as “a kind of problem-solving type skill” in general, constitutes the common point of them. The most common dimensions found in reviewed documents were; decomposition, abstraction, pattern, algorithm and evaluation-debugging. The fact that one of the dimensions of computational thinking being algorithm which is also related to coding -one of the most important topics in the world- helps to explain its importance. Considering today's definitions, characteristics and dimensions of computational thinking, it was thought that there is a need for more practical studies and studies about integration into curriculum, for better understanding