From Computing to Computational Thinking

Chapter 1

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

We are in the middle of an information revolution brought by the modern digital computer. It’s nearly impossible for anyone to escape the reach of the resulting IT technologies. Even if you are not becoming a computer scientist or IT professional, a good overall understanding of how things work “under the hood” can be very advantageous, because we are all IT consumers.

The transforming power of the digital computer comes from it being a universal machine ¹ . It is universal because it does not need rewiring or other physical modifications to perform different computations. Instead, the same hardware just needs to execute a different program. We’ll look at the hardware and software aspects of the ...