Teaching CT with CS

Usually, teaching computational thinking (CT) skills involves incorporating things like abstraction, algorithms, decomposition, pattern matching, and the like into courses that are not technical in nature. However, since I am a computer science (CS) teacher, I thought it would be interesting to decompose the programming process in terms of CT skills.

What follows is the first three days of a unit I am teaching where the students will ultimately create a working version of the video game Flappy Bird. In order to get to that terminus, there are a series of smaller skills that must be learned and mastered. The first three days of the unit center on basic skills such as creating the game window, placing objects on the screen, and making objects move. The programming language is Lua which is a scripting language often used in game design because of its speed and portability.

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