¹College of Mathematics & Information Technology, Hebei Normal University of Science & Technology, Qinhuangdao, China
²EECS, University of Ottawa, 800 King Edward, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada

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Abstract—The paper aims at revealing the essence and connotation of Computational Thinking. It analyzed some of the international academia’s research results of Computational Thinking. The author thinks Computational Thinking is discipline thinking or computing philosophy, and it is very critical to understand Computational Thinking to grasp the thinking’ s computational features and the computing’s thinking attributes. He presents the basic rules of screening the representative terms of Computational Thinking and lists some representative terms based on the rules. He thinks Computational Thinking is contained in the commonalities of those terms. The typical thoughts of Computational Thinking are structuralization, formalization, association-and-interaction, optimization and reuse-and-sharing. Training Computational Thinking must base on the representative terms and the typical thoughts. There are three innovations in the paper: the five rules of screening the representative terms, the five typical thoughts and the formalized description of Computational Thinking.

Index Terms—Computational Thinking, computational features, thinking attributes

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Cite: Wenchong Shi, Maohua Liu, Peter Hendler, "Computational Features of the Thinking and the Thinking Attributes of Computing: on Computational Thinking," Journal of Software vol. 9, no. 10, pp. 2507-2513, 2014.